P H I L O M E L B O O K S
A N I M P R I N T O F P E N G U I N G R O U P ( U S A ) I N C .
S C O R PI A R I S I NG
ALSO BY ANTHONY HOROWITZ
THE ALEX RIDER NOVELS:
Stormbreaker
Point Blank
Skeleton Key
Eagle Strike
Scorpia
Ark Angel
Snakehead
Crocodile Tears
THE DIAMOND BROTHERS MYSTERIES:
The Falcon’s Malteser
Public Enemy Number Two
Three of Diamonds
South by Southeast
Horowitz Horror
More Horowitz Horror
Bloody Horowitz
The Devil and His Boy
P H I L O M E L B O O K S
A N I M P R I N T O F P E N G U I N G R O U P ( U S A ) I N C .
PHILOMEL BOOKS
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ISBN 1-101-46795-9
Dedicated to every reader who set out
on this journey with me and who has now
come to its end.
S C O R PI A R I S I NG
P ART
ONE
S C O R P I A
1
S T O L E N S T A T U E S
THE MAN IN THE BLACK CASHMERE coat climbed down
the steps of his private, six-seater Learjet 40 and stood
for a moment, his breath frosting in the chill morning air.
He glanced across the tarmac as a refueling truck rum-
bled past. In the distance, two men in yellow were stand-
ing, talking, in front of a hangar. Otherwise, he seemed
to be alone. Ahead of him, a sign read Welcome to Lon-
don’s City Airport, and beneath it an open door beck-
oned, leading to immigration. He headed for it, completely
unaware that he was being watched every step of the way.
The man was in his fifties, bald and expressionless.
Inside the terminal, he gave his passport to the official
and watched with blank eyes as it was examined and
handed back, then continued on his way. He had no lug-
gage. There was a black limousine waiting for him out-
side with a gray-suited chauffeur behind the wheel. The
man offered no greeting as he got in nor did he speak as
they set off, following the curve of the River Thames up
toward Canning Town and on toward the center of Lon-
don itself.
His name was Zeljan Kurst and he was wanted by
the police in seventeen different countries. He was the
chief executive of the international criminal organization
4
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
known as Scorpia, and as far as it was known, he had
never actually been seen on the streets of London. How-
ever, MI6 had been tipped off that he was coming. They
had been waiting for him to land. The passport official
was one of their agents. They were following him now.
“Heading west on the A13 Commercial Road toward
Whitechapel. Car three, take over at the next intersection.”
“Car three moving into position.”
“Okay. Dropping back.”
The disembodied voices bounced across the airwaves
on a channel so secret that anyone trying to tune in with-
out the necessary filters would have heard only the hiss of
static. It would have been easier to have arrested Kurst
at the airport. He could have been made to disappear
in five seconds, bundled out in a crate and never seen
again. But it had been decided, at the very highest level, to
follow him and see where he went. For the head of Scor-
pia to be in England at all was remarkable. For him to
be on his own, and on his way to a meeting, was beyond
belief.
Zeljan Kurst was not aware that he was surrounded.
He had no idea that his flight plan had been leaked by one
of his own people in return for a complete change of
identity and a new life in Panama. But even so, he was
uneasy. Everything had told him that he shouldn’t be
here. When the invitation had first arrived on his desk,
delivered by a series of middlemen and traveling halfway
around the world and back again, he had thought about
S t o l e n
Statues
5
refusing. He was not an errand boy. He couldn’t be
summoned like a waiter in a restaurant. But then he had
reconsidered.
When the fourth-richest man in the world asks you to
meet him, and pays you one million dollars just to turn
up, it might be worth it to hear what he has to say.
“We’re on High Holborn. Car four moving to intercept.”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. He’s turning off.”
The limousine had crossed the main road and entered
a narrow street full of old-fashioned shops and cafés. The
move had taken the MI6 men by surprise, and for a mo-
ment there was panic as they struggled to catch up. Two
of their cars swerved across the traffic—to a blast of
horns—and plunged in after it. They were just in time to
see the limousine stop and Zeljan Kurst get out.
“Car four, where are you?” The voice was suddenly
urgent. “Where is the target?”
A pause. Then—“He’s entering the British Museum.”
It was true. Kurst had passed through the gates and
was crossing the open area in front of the famous build-
ing that rose up ahead of him, its huge pillars stretching
from one side to the other. He was carrying an ebony
walking stick that measured out his progress, rapping
against the concrete. The MI6 men were already piling
out of their own cars, but they were too late. Even as they
watched from the other side of the gates, Kurst disap-
peared into the building, and they knew that if they didn’t
act swiftly, they would lose him for good. There was more
6
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
than one way out. It was unlikely that the Scorpia man
would have traveled all the way to England just to look at
an exhibit. He might have gone inside deliberately to lose
them.
“He’s inside the museum. Cars one, two, and three,
surround the building. Watch all possible exits. We need
immediate backup.”
Someone had taken charge. But whoever it was, his
voice sounded high-pitched and uncertain. It was eleven
o’clock on a bright February morning. The museum
would be crowded with tourists and schoolchildren. If
there was going to be any action, if they were going to
arrest Zeljan Kurst, this was the last place they would
have wanted to do it.
In fact, Kurst was still unaware of his pursuers as he
crossed the Great Court, a gleaming white space with a
spectacular glass roof sweeping in a huge curve overhead.
He skirted around the gift shops and information booths,
making for the first galleries. As he went, he noticed a
Japanese couple, tiny and almost identical, taking photo-
graphs of each other against a twisting staircase. A
bearded student with a backpack stood next to the post-
cards, pulling them out one at a time and studying them
as if trying to find hidden codes. Tap, tap, tap. The end of
the walking stick beat out its rhythm as he contin- ued
on his way. He knew exactly where he was going and
would arrive at the exact minute that had been agreed
upon.
S t o l e n
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7
Zeljan Kurst was a large man with heavy, broad shoul-
ders that formed a straight line on either side of an un-
naturally thick neck. He was bald by choice. His head had
been shaved and there was a dark gray shadow beneath
the skin. His eyes, a muddy brown, showed little intelli-
gence, and he had the thick lips and small, squashed nose
of a wrestler, or perhaps a bouncer at a shady nightclub.
Many people had underestimated him and occasionally
Kurst had found it necessary to correct them. This usu-
ally involved killing them. He walked past the statue of a
naked, crouching goddess. An elderly woman with a
deerstalker hat, sitting on a stool with brushes and oil
paints, was making a bad copy of it on a large white can-
vas. Ahead of Kurst were two stone animals—strangely
shaped lions—and to one side an entire temple, more
than two thousand years old, brought from southwest
Turkey and reconstructed piece by piece. He barely
glanced at them. He didn’t like museums, although his
house was furnished with rare objects that had been sto-
len from several of them. But that was the point. Why
should something that might be worth hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars be left to molder in a dark room, stared
at by idiot members of the general public who had little
or no idea of its true value? Kurst had a simple rule of
life. To enjoy something fully, you had to own it. And if
you couldn’t buy it, then you would have to steal it.
Ahead of him, two modern glass doors led into a final
gallery. He watched as a tall, well-built black man carrying
8
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
a notebook and pen walked through, then went in himself.
The gallery was huge, stretching out in both directions,
like an airport runway. Although there were more than
a hundred people there, it wasn’t even half full. Every
thing was gray: the walls, the floor, the very air. But spot-
lights shining down from the ceiling, ten times higher
than the visitors who stood beneath it, picked out the trea-
sures that the room contained and these shone, soft and
gold.
They ran along both walls, from one end to the other,
a series of marble tablets with a crowd of figures that had
been brought together to form a single line. They were
men and women, ancient Greeks, some sitting, some
standing, some talking, some riding on horseback. Some
carried musical instruments, others bundles of linen or
plates and glasses for a feast. Many of them were incom-
plete. Two and a half millennia had worn away their faces,
broken off arms and legs. But there was something re-
markable about the details that remained. It was easy to
see that these had been real people, that they had once
lived ordinary lives until they had been frozen in this wak-
ing dream, an entire world captured in stone.
Zeljan Kurst barely glanced at them. The gallery had
two raised platforms, one at each end, reached by a short
flight of steps or an elevator—which must have been used
by the man he had come to see. He was on the far right,
sitting on his own in a wheelchair, with a blanket over his
knees. Kurst walked over to him.
S t o l e n
Statues
9
“Mr. Kurst?” The voice was dry and strangled. It came
from a lizard neck.
Kurst nodded. He was a careful man and had made it
a rule never to speak unless there was a particular need.
“I am Ariston.”
“I know who you are.”
“Thank you for coming.”
Yannis Ariston Xenopolos was said to be worth about
thirty-five billion dollars. He had made this money from
a huge shipping empire, which he controlled from his of-
fices in Athens. To this he had added an airline, Ariston
Air, and a chain of hotels. And now he was dying. Kurst
would have known it even without reading stories in the
newspapers. It was obvious from the sunken cheeks, the
dreadful white of the man’s skin, the way he sat like a
hunched-up Egyptian mummy, his body disappearing
into itself. But most of all it was in his eyes. Kurst had
once been the head of the Yugoslav police force, and he
had always been interested in the way the prisoners had
looked at him just before he executed them. He could see
the same thing right here. The Greek had accepted death.
All hope had gone.
“I took a considerable risk coming here.” Kurst spoke
with a heavy Eastern European accent which somehow
dragged his words down. “What is it you want?”
“I would have thought the answer would be obvious
to you.”
“The Elgin marbles . . .”
10
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
“Exactly. I wanted you to come here so that you would
understand.”
Ariston reached out with a hand that was more like a
claw, gripping a lever on the arm of his wheelchair. The
whole thing was battery operated, and with a soft whir, it
spun him around so that he faced the room.
“This is one of the greatest pieces of art that the world
has ever produced,” he began. “Take a look at the figures,
Mr. Kurst. They are so beautiful that it is almost impos-
sible to find the words to describe them. They once deco-
rated a temple in the heart of Athens—the Parthenon,
dedicated to Athena, the Statue of wisdom. The frieze
that you are examining depicts the summer festival that
took place every year in honor of the goddess . . .”
Again the claw pressed down, turning him so that he
faced a group of statues that stood inside the chamber,
behind him. First there was a horse rising as if out of
water, with only its head showing. Then came a statue,
lying on his back. Then three women, all missing their
heads. From the way they were arranged, it was clear that
these figures had once stood in the triangles at each end
of the Parthenon.
“The horse belonged to Elgin Marble statues!
“I am familiar with the Elgin marbles,” Kurst inter
rupted. It didn’t matter how much he had been paid. He
hadn’t come here for a lecture.
S t o l e n
Statues
11
“Then you will also be aware that they were all plun
dered. Stolen! Two hundred years ago, a British aristo-
crat called Lord Elgin came to Athens. He tore them
off the temple and transported them back to London.
Since then my country has asked many times for them
to be returned. We have even built a new museum in Ath-
ens to house them. They are the glory of Greece, Mr.
Kurst. They are part of our heritage. They should come
home.”
The old man fumbled in his blanket and produced an
oxygen mask, which he pressed against his face. There
was the hiss of compressed air and he sucked greedily. At
last, he began again.
“But the British government has refused. They insist
on keeping this stolen property. They will not listen to the
voice of the Greek people. And so I have decided that,
although it is the last thing I will do in my life, I will make
them listen. That is why I have contacted you and your
organization. I want you to steal the sculptures and re-
turn them to Greece.”
On the street outside, four more cars had pulled up
next to the British Museum, spilling out fifteen more
agents. That made twenty-three in total with the ones
who had followed Kurst from City Airport. They were
fairly confident that their man was still inside the build
ing. But with ninety-four galleries covering a floor space
of two and a half square miles, it was going to be almost
impossible to find him. And already the order had gone
out. Do not, under any circumstances, approach him
12
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
while he is in a public area. This man is extremely danger-
ous. If he feels that he’s trapped, there’s no saying what
he will do. The result could be a bloodbath.
Zeljan Kurst was quite unaware of the approaching
MI6 men as he considered what the Greek billionaire had
just said.
“Stealing the Elgin marbles won’t help you,” Kurst
said. “The British government will simply demand them
back. It would be better to threaten them. To blackmail
them, perhaps.”
“Do whatever it takes. I don’t care. You can kill half
the population of this loathsome country if it will achieve
what I want . . .” Ariston broke into a fit of coughing.
Pearls of white saliva appeared at his lips.
Kurst waited for him to recover. Then he nodded
slowly. “It can be done,” he said. “But it will take time.
And it will be expensive.”
Ariston nodded. “This work is my legacy to the Greek
people. If you will agree to do it for me, I will pay you five
million dollars immediately with a further fifteen million
when you succeed.”
“It’s not enough,” Kurst said.
Ariston looked at him slyly. “There was a time when
you might have said that and I would have been forced to
agree,” he said. “But Scorpia is not what it was. There
have been two failures in the space of a single year. The
operation called Invisible Sword and, more recently, the
business in northwest Australia.” He smiled, showing
S t o l e n
Statues
13
gray teeth. “The very fact that you are here today shows
how weak you have become.”
“Scorpia has regrouped,” Kurst retorted. “We have
taken on new recruits. I would say we are stronger than
ever. We can choose our clients, Mr. Xenopolos, and we
do not negotiate.”
“Name your price.”
“Forty million.”
Ariston’s eyes barely flickered. “Agreed.”
“Half in advance.”
“As you wish.”
Kurst turned and walked away without saying another
word, his cane beating the same rhythm on the floor. As
he made his way back toward the entrance, his mind was
already focused on the task that lay ahead. Although he
would never have dreamed of saying as much, he was
glad that he had come here today. It was actually very
much his desire to take on the British government once
again. The failures that Ariston had mentioned had both
involved the British secret service.
It was fortunate that the old man hadn’t heard the full
story. Would he have still approached Scorpia if he had
known the almost incredible truth? That both failures
had involved the same fourteen-year-old boy?
In the end, it was just bad luck—bad timing—that he
left when he did. He was about to reach the Great Court
when one of the MI6 agents crossed in front of him and
suddenly the two of them were face-to-face, only inches
14
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
apart. The agent—his name was Travis—was new and
inexperienced. He was unable to keep the shock out of
his eyes, and at that moment Kurst knew that he had been
recognized.
Travis had no choice. He had been given his orders,
but he knew that if he obeyed them he would die. He
fumbled in his jacket and pulled out his pistol, the 9mm
Browning that has long been a favorite of the SAS. At the
same time, he shouted, louder than he needed to, “Stay
where you are! If you move, I’ll fire.” It was exactly how
he had been trained. He was both exerting his authority
over his target and alerting any nearby agents that his
cover had been blown.
Unfortunately, in the silence of the museum and with
the ceiling so high overhead, his words echoed out. A few
tourists turned to see what was happening. They caught
sight of the gun. The first seeds of panic were planted and
instantly began to grow.
Kurst raised his hands, one of them still holding the
ebony walking stick. At the same time, he moved very
slightly to one side. Travis followed him with his eyes and
didn’t see something flash through the air over Kurst’s
shoulder, didn’t even notice it until it had buried itself in
his throat. The old woman who had been painting the
copy of the kneeling statue had followed Kurst to the
door. Underneath the makeup, she wasn’t old at all, and
her brushes might have had tufts at one end, but the han-
dles were precision-made steel and razor sharp. Travis
S t o l e n
Statues
15
fell to his knees. In the last second of his life, his trigger
finger tightened and the gun went off, the explosion am-
plified by the stone walls all around. That was when the
panic began for real.
The tourists screamed and scattered, some of them
diving into the shop or behind the information desks. A
group of primary school students, who had just been vis-
iting the Egyptian mummies, crouched down beside the
stairs, cowering together. An American woman, standing
by herself, began to scream. The British Museum guards,
many of them old and long retired from their real careers,
remained frozen to the spot, completely unprepared for
an event like this. Meanwhile, Kurst stepped over the
dead man and continued to move slowly toward the main
door.
Of course he hadn’t come to the museum alone. Scor-
pia would not have risked the freedom of its chief execu-
tive, even for a million dollars, and its agents surrounded
him on all sides. As the other MI6 agents closed in from
every direction, still unsure what had happened but
knowing that all the rules had changed, they were met by
a hail of machine-gun fire. The bearded student who had
been examining the postcards had reached into his back-
pack and drawn out a miniature machine gun with fold-
ing shoulder stock and was spraying the hall with bullets.
An MI6 man, halfway down the west stairs, threw his
arms back in surprise, then jerked forward and tumbled
down. The American woman was still screaming. The
16
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
primary school children were crying in terror. All the
alarms in the building had gone off. There were people
running in every direction.
The Japanese man who had been photographing his
wife threw his camera on the floor and it exploded with a
soft woomph, releasing thick, dark green fumes into the
air. In seconds, Kurst had disappeared. The Great Court
had become a battle zone. Two MI6 men slid to a halt,
trying to peer through the smoke. There was a loud crack,
then another, and they fell to the ground. They had been
shot in the legs by the Japanese woman, who had
produced a pearl-handled Nambu pistol from her
handbag.
Meanwhile, holding a handkerchief across his face,
Kurst had reached the main doors. There had been little
security when he came in. There was none as he left. Out
of the corner of his eye he saw an MI6 agent try to rush
him, then fall back as he was grabbed by his personal
bodyguard, the black man with the notebook whom he
had registered on his way to the Elgin marbles. The
human neck makes an unmistakable sound when it is
snapped, and he heard it now. The agent slumped to the
ground. Kurst walked out into the fresh air.
There were people running between the pillars, tum-
bling down the steps, and hurling themselves across the
open area in front of the building. Already the police were
on their way, their sirens growing in volume as they came
together from different parts of the city. Kurst’s limou-
S t o l e n
Statues
17
sine was waiting for him at the gate. But there were
two men moving purposefully toward him, both dressed
in charcoal gray suits and sunglasses. He briefly won
dered why people who worked in espionage had to make
themselves look so obvious. They had become aware of
the chaos inside the British Museum and were racing in.
Perhaps they hadn’t expected him to emerge so quickly.
Kurst lifted his walking stick. It was in fact a hollowed-
out tube with a single gas-fired bullet and an electric
trigger concealed just beneath the handle. The bullet had
been specially modified. It wouldn’t just kill a man. It
would tear him in half.
He fired. The man on the left was blown off his feet,
landing in a spinning, bloody ball. The second man froze
for just one second. It was much too long. Moving sur-
prisingly fast for someone of his age, Kurst swung the
walking stick through the air, using it like a sword. The
metal casing slammed into the agent’s throat and he
crumpled instantly. Kurst lumbered toward the car. The
passenger door was already open and he threw himself in,
slamming it behind him. There was a series of gunshots.
But the car windows were bulletproof and the bodywork
was armor-plated. With a screech of tires, the limousine
swung out. Another man stood in the way, his gun held
commando-style in both hands. He fired once. The bullet
slammed into the window right in front of Kurst’s face,
leaving a dent and a spider’s web of cracks. The chauffeur
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
accelerated. There was a thud as the man hit the fender
and he was hurled out of the way.
Two hours later, a man in a blond wig, wearing sunglasses
and holding a huge bunch of flowers, boarded the Euro
star train to Paris. Zeljan Kurst hated these disguises, but
it was something else he had learned in his long career. If
you’re trying not to be seen, it often helps to make your
self as prominent as possible. The flowers and the wig
were ridiculous, and although the police and MI6 were
looking for him all over London, they certainly wouldn’t
associate them with him.
As he settled into his prebooked seat in first class and
sipped his complimentary glass of chilled cola, Kurst’s
mind was focused on the problem he had been given. The
shoot-out at the museum was already forgotten. The
question was—who would be the best person to handle
this quite interesting business of the Elgin marbles?
There were now twelve members of Scorpia, including
him, and he mentally went over them one by one.
Levi Kroll, the former Israeli agent who, in a moment
of carelessness, had shot out his own eye? Mikato, the
Japanese policeman turned Yakuza gangster? Dr. Three?
Or perhaps this might be an opportunity for their newest
recruit. He had the sort of mind that would enjoy work-
ing out a problem of this complexity, along with the ruth-
lessness to see it through to the end.
There was a blast of a whistle and the train moved off.
S t o l e n
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19
Kurst took out his mobile phone—encrypted, of course—
and dialed a number. The train slid down the platform
and picked up speed, and as they left King’s Cross Inter
national, Kurst permitted himself the rare luxury of a
smile. Yes. Razim was perfect. He would bring his unique
talents to this new assignment. Kurst was sure of it. He
had chosen exactly the right man.
2
T H E
M E A S U R E M E N T OF
P A I N
“THANK YOU. THANK YOU. Thank you, my dear Mr.
Kurst. I will begin to consider the matter at once.”
The man with the silver hair flipped shut his mobile
phone and slid it into the top pocket of his dishdasha—
the long-sleeved white cotton dress worn by most Arab
men. He stood for a moment, savoring the air. It was a
cool night, but then of course this was only February.
Two months from now and the temperature would rise
into the eighties . . . considerably more during the day.
He looked up at the stars. There were just a few of them
tonight, but they shone with more intensity than any stars
in the world. He never tired of their beauty, and of course,
living here in the middle of the Sahara Desert in Egypt,
there was no light pollution and he could see them more
clearly than anywhere else.
The sun had set two hours ago, but there was still a
deep, unearthly blue glow in the sky on the edge of the
horizon. Looking out across the desert, he could just
make out the pale gray of the salt lakes that were spread
out all around. For this was the Siwa Oasis, 350 miles
from Cairo, a place that owed its existence to the fluke of
there being water in the desert, not just the salt lakes but
freshwater wells and thermal springs, bubbling up from
T h e M e a s u r e m e n t o f P a i n 21
the bowels of the earth. Ten miles away, he could just
make out the glimmering streetlights that signaled the
town of Siwa. Apart from a few hotels, shops, and Inter-
net cafés, there wasn’t very much there, and the man vis-
ited the town as seldom as possible. Nobody from the
town ever came here.
The man was standing on the parapet of a French fort,
built at the end of the eighteenth century when Na-
poleon had invaded Egypt. A few new buildings had been
added more recently, and there were signs of further
construction . . . scaffolding, construction equipment,
and a great pile of salt that had been drawn from the lake
and would be mixed with sand to make bricks.
There was something very strange about the com-
pound, which stood on its own, perfectly square, sur-
rounded by sand. It looked like something out of a
Hollywood movie . . . or perhaps a mirage. First, there
was the outer wall, not high but several feet thick, with
battlements all the way around and solid guard towers
rising up much farther at each of the four corners. These
were punctuated by narrow, slotlike windows, making it
easy to look out but impossible to look in. The only way
into the fort was through an arched gateway with an oak
door—it was made of whole tree trunks bound with steel
and it would have taken several men to open if it hadn’t
been electrically operated.
Inside, the fort was like an army barracks with a dozen
buildings neatly laid out around a central well. Water, of
22
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
course, was everything in the desert. An army would be
able to survive here for months—living, sleeping, exercis-
ing, and drilling on the parade ground, hardly aware of
the world outside. There were two accommodation
blocks—one for officers, one for common soldiers—a
prison block, various storerooms, a bakery, and a chapel.
All of these had been converted with air-conditioning, hot
and cold running water, every modern comfort. The old
stables had been turned into a recreation room with
snooker tables and a cinema screen. The armory still con-
tained weapons—though very different from the ones
used by the forces of Napoleon.
These included flamethrowers, hand grenades, and
even handheld rocket launchers . . . for the man who had
privately purchased the fort and redesigned it needed to
be safe, and beneath the sun-baked bricks, the dusty
courtyard, and the ancient battlements lay some very so-
phisticated equipment indeed. Everything was powered
by an electric generator housed in what had once been
the forge. A radio mast and three satellite dishes rose
above one of the towers. Television cameras watched for
any movement. At night, infrared lights and radar scanned
the area all around. All of these were wired into the con-
trol room, once the bakery, with a single chimney rising
above a flat roof, leading up from what had once been the
bread oven. The control room was manned twenty-four
hours a day, and nobody could enter or leave without
authorization—the main gate could be opened only from
T h e M e a s u r e m e n t o f P a i n 23
inside. It was in constant radio communication with the
guards on patrol. These were local men, dressed in Bed-
ouin style, with headdresses, loose-fitting robes, sandals,
and knives at their belts. They also had machine guns
slung over their shoulders.
The man’s name was Razim, but that wasn’t what he
called himself now. As an internationally
wanted
criminal, it was better
not to have any name at all. In the
end, he had jumbled up letters from his name and come
up with Razim— which was how he was known to his
friends in Scorpia. And in truth, he had no other friends.
He was unmarried. Sometimes he would spend a whole
month without speaking to anyone at all. But Razim
didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it that way.
Razim was not an Egyptian. He had been born forty-
five years ago in the town of Tikrit, in Iraq. His father was
a university professor. His mother had studied Ara- bic
literature at the University of Cambridge and had her- self
become a well-known writer and poet. He was one of two
children—he had an older sister named Rima. The family
lived together in one of the oldest houses of the city, a
narrow, white brick building con- structed around a
central courtyard packed with flowers and plants and
with a fountain playing in the middle.
From the very start, Razim was a difficult child. His
father used to joke that he had been born in a sandstorm
24
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
and that some of the sand must have gotten into his
blood. As a baby, he never smiled or gurgled but lay sul-
lenly in his cot as if wondering how he had got there and
how, perhaps, he might escape. As soon as he learned to
walk, he tried to run away. Nannies never stayed long in
the household. Razim’s temper tantrums drove three of
them away. The fourth left with a pair of nail scissors
driven into her thigh after she had told him off for teasing
his sister.
At least he did well at school . . . indeed, his teachers
thought that he was a genius. He came top in every sub-
ject and by the age of twelve was almost fluent in three
languages. It was hardly surprising that he didn’t get
along with the other children. Even then Razim had no
friends, but he preferred it that way. He was a quiet, sol-
itary boy, and he had already come to realize that there
was something different about him, even though he
wasn’t quite sure what it was. Eventually, though, after
considerable thought, he managed to work it out. He had
no emotions. Nothing scared him or upset him. Nothing
made him particularly happy either. There was no food
that he particularly enjoyed. It was as if the whole of life
had been put under a laboratory slide and he was the
scientist examining it. Every day for him was the same.
He didn’t feel anything.
He decided to put this to the test. His parents had
bought him a pet, a scruffy mongrel, when he was small
and it had always been his companion. So one day he
T h e M e a s u r e m e n t o f P a i n 25
took it down to the orchard behind his parents’ house and
left it there.
His mother and father wondered about the missing dog,
and they also noticed the scratches on Razim’s hands and
arms, but they accepted his explanation that he had
brushed against a barbed-wire fence. They were both
intelligent people, but no parent wants to think the worst
of their child, and the truth was that Razim was still doing
brilliantly at school. He ate his meals with them and
came with them to the mosque for family prayers. was
polite to his sister. What more could they ask?
In 1979, the history of Iraq changed when Saddam
Hussein came to power. Razim heard about this little
twist of cruelty.
In the end, Razim was sent to live with a wealthy
family, distant relatives of the president, in Tehran. The
family despised him on first sight but knew better than
to ask any questions, and from this moment on he began
to thrive. He continued to do brilliantly at school and at
seventeen became the youngest student to enter the Col-
lege of Engineering at Amir Adaad Campus, part of the
University of Tehran. By now he had changed his mind
about his future. He would use his scientific skills to
become a Scientist.
26
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
T h e M e a s u r e m e n t o f P a i n 27
When he finished his education, he chose Cairo to
settle in. With a population of seven million crammed
into eighty-three square miles, he would be completely
invisible. He briefly considered plastic surgery. There
were plenty of clinics in the backstreets of West Zamalek,
a high-rise area of the city on the edge of the Nile, and if
you paid enough, nobody would ask any questions. But
in fact, very few people knew what he looked like. He had
taken great care that this should be the case, always
covering his head with the traditional ghutra, or Arab
scarf. When he was in Western dress, he had worn
sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down low. He
decided that surgery would not be needed. He lived
quietly, making sure he didn’t attract any attention. And
he waited for the next opportunity to reveal itself, as he
was sure it would.
He still owned a penthouse apartment in the center of
Cairo and a summerhouse in the Red Sea resort of Sharm
el-Sheikh. But his favorite home was where he was now,
this long-forgotten fort lost in 1.2 million square miles
of sand. This was where he came to get away from the
crowds. It was where he felt more secure. And it was a
28
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
perfect setting, too, for the series of experiments in which
he was now engaged.
There was a rope bridge that crossed from one side of
the complex to the other. Razim had ordered it to be in-
stalled to save him walking all the way around. He crossed
it now, putting out two hands to steady himself as it
swayed beneath his feet. The salt pile was right beneath
him now, and he watched as one of the guards emptied a
wheelbarrow, adding to the heap. Razim had insisted that
the new building be done in the traditional Berber style,
mixing salt with sand. It was slow—but it felt right.
Everything was quiet. The desert had settled for the
night. He reached the other end of the bridge and walked
along the opposite parapet until he came to a stone stair-
case that led back down to ground level. He took it. A
second guard stood respectfully to attention as he walked
past.
Razim still didn’t know how Scorpia had managed to
track him down. At first it had worried him. If they could
find him, then any one of the world’s intelligence agen
cies might follow. But he had soon realized that Scorpia
was an organization like no other. After all, by and large
the police and security services do not threaten murder
or violence to get the information they want. And in the
end, he was glad that they had decided to seek him out.
They were offering exactly the sort of work that inter-
ested him along with the promise of enormous sums of
money. The two of them really were made for each other.
T h e M e a s u r e m e n t o f P a i n 29
Take this new assignment, the first he would handle as
project leader. It was already a fascinating challenge: how
to return the Elgin marbles to Greece. Like Zeljan Kurst,
Razim had already dismissed the idea of stealing them,
although that would surely have been easy enough. When
was the last time anyone had checked security at the Brit-
ish Museum? Many of the roofs were made of glass and
the security staff, low paid and lazy, could be either bribed
or replaced. But that wouldn’t work. If the marbles were
ever to be seen in public again, then they would have to
be returned legally, with the full cooperation of the Brit-
ish government. So what it came down to was a question
of leverage. How could Scorpia persuade them to do
something that they had always refused to do?
Razim didn’t really care when he died—or how. But
he didn’t like being bossed around by governments
.
Small clouds of dust rose around his feet as he crossed
the courtyard. The beam of the spotlight swept the ground
just ahead. Still smoking, he went into a circular building
with a domed roof and a tower. This had once been a
chapel. Razim had found faded pictures of various saints
30
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
on some of the walls and there was even a stained-glass
window—the only glass in the entire place. Perhaps
French soldiers had come here once to pray that they
would soon be sent home. Razim had smashed the win-
dow and painted over the frescoes. They were of no inter-
est to him. He had, of course, never believed in God.
The interior was brightly lit and kept at a pleasant
temperature by a sophisticated air-conditioning system.
The walls were now all white and purposefully thick, to
keep out the heat. There were machines everywhere:
computers, television monitors, different-sized boxes
with dials and gauges. In the middle of all this, trapped in
a pool of brilliant light, a man sat in a leather dentist’s
chair, tied to it by soft cords around his ankles and wrists.
The man was wearing only boxer shorts. Dozens of wires
had been attached to him—to his head, his chest, his
pulse, his abdomen—held in place by sticky tape. By a
happy coincidence, the man was French. He was about
thirty years old and he was trying not to look afraid. He
was failing.
Razim knew his name. It was Luc Fontaine and he
worked for the DGSE, which is the French intelligence
agency dealing in external security. The man was, in
other words, a secret agent, a spy. Razim had always
known that foreign investigators would come looking for
him and he therefore kept a careful lookout for them.
This one had actually gotten closer than many. He had
been picked up asking questions in the central market—
T h e M e a s u r e m e n t o f P a i n 31
or souk—knocked out and then brought here. He was still
pretending to be a tourist, but only halfheartedly. By now
he knew that he was in the hands of a man who did not
make mistakes.
There was a trolley covered with a white cloth next to
the dentist’s chair. Razim wheeled it around and uncov
ered it to reveal a series of knives lined up in neat rows,
each one a different shape and size, gleaming in the harsh
light. There were other instruments too: swabs and silver
bowls, hypodermic syringes, vials containing liquids that
were colorless but somehow didn’t look like water. Fon
taine saw this. He tried not to show any emotion. But his
skin crawled.
Razim pulled up a stool and sat down.
“What do you want?” Fontaine asked. He spoke in
French. His voice was hoarse.
Razim didn’t answer.
“I’m not going to tell you anything.” The secret agent
had dropped the pretense that he was a tourist. He knew
there was no longer any point in it.
“And I am not going to ask you anything,” Razim re
plied. His French was excellent. It was one of the lan-
guages he had learned at school. “You have no information
that I wish to know.”
“Then why am I here?” The young man flexed his
arms, the muscles rising, but the cords held fast.
“I will tell you.” Razim s a i d ,
32
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
“I have been many things in my life,” he said, “but when I
set out, I was an engineer. That is how I was trained.
Science, in its many varieties, has always been an interest of
mine. And you should be glad that you are here with me
tonight, Luc. Do you mind if I call you Luc? I am pursuing
a project that will be of great benefit to the world, and fate
has chosen you to help me.”
“My people know I’m here.”
“Nobody knows you are here. Even you do not know
where you are. Please try not to interrupt.”
Razim said,
“It occurred to me some years ago that everything in
this world is measured and that many of these measure-
ments have been named after the great engineers. The
most obvious example is the watt, which measures electric-
ity, and which was named after James Watt, the inventor
of the modern steam engine. Joule and Newton were both
physicists and have been immortalized in the measurement
of energy . . . joules and newtons. Every day we measure
the atmospheric heat in either Fahrenheit or Celsius. The
first was a German physicist, the second a Swedish
astronomer.
“We measure distance and height and speed and
brightness. If you wish to buy anything from a shoe to a
sheet of paper, you ask for it by size. There are measur-
ing units that many people have never heard of. Can you
tell me what a pyron is? Or a palmo? Or a petaflop? But
here is the strange thing. There has never been a mea-
T h e M e a s u r e m e n t o f P a i n 33
surement for something we experience almost every day
of our lives.
“There has never been a measurement for pain. “Can
you imagine how useful it would be if you went
to the dentist and he was able to reassure you? ‘Don’t
worry, my dear fellow, this is going to hurt only two and
a half units.’ Or if you went to the doctor with a damaged
knee and were able to tell him that it hurt three units
down here—but seven-point-five units up here, above the
knee? Of course, it is very difficult to measure pain. It all
depends on how our nerves react and what the stimulus
is—the knife, electricity, fire, acid—that has caused the
pain. But I still believe it is possible to develop a universal
scale. And I very much hope that one day the unit of pain
will indeed be named after me. The Razim. And people
will be able to say exactly how many Razims will result in
certain death.”
Fontaine was staring at Razim as if seeing him for the
first time. “You’re mad,” he whispered.
“All the great inventors have a certain madness,” Razim
agreed. “They said the same of Galileo and Einstein. It is
what I would expect you to say.”
“Please . . .”
“I would also expect you to beg. But I’m afraid it will
do you no good.”
Razim leaned over the trolley and considered. It would
be interesting to see how long this Frenchman would sur-
vive. Of course, for the sake of accuracy, he would have
34
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
to experiment on women. And if one ever came his way,
a teenager would be useful too. Everybody reacts to pain
in different ways and he needed to examine the full spec-
trum. He made his decision and chose an instrument.
Moments later, the needles on the various monitors
leapt forward as the first screams rang out into the night.
3
FL Y - BY- N I G H T
THE TOURIST BOAT WAS MOORED at the Quai de la Loire,
on the very western edge of the city. But the people who
stepped on board four months later on a bright af-
ternoon in June most definitely were not tourists.
It had been Max Grendel, the oldest member of Scor-
pia, who had decided that they should have a floating
office in Paris. This had been one of the last decisions he
had made, as he had died a few months later, stung to
death in a gondola in Venice. The bateau-mouche—
literally “fly boat”—looked like any one of the pleasure
craft gliding up and down the river. It was long and nar-
row with a flat bottom and a low canopy made almost
entirely of glass to give its passengers the best possible
views. Inside, however, it was very different. Instead of
rows of seating for two or three hundred sightseers, there
was a single conference table and twelve chairs. A sound-
proof wall separated this area from the cabin where the
captain and the first mate stood at the controls. The rest
of the crew, four men in their twenties, stayed on the
deck. They were not allowed to look into the cabin. They
stood as still as the statues that lined the bridges, their
eyes fixed on both banks of the river, searching for any
movement that might be construed as enemy action.
40
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
Grendel’s idea wasn’t quite as odd as it might seem.
Unlike a building, a boat would be impossible to bug,
particularly as it was kept under twenty-four-hour guard
and thoroughly swept before any meeting. Also, unlike a
building, it could move, so anyone trying to eavesdrop on
what was being said would have to move too, at equal
speed. And as the ship was fitted with a Ruston 12RK
diesel engine stolen from a Royal Navy River Class Patrol
Vessel, that might be very fast indeed. Finally, should a
police launch attempt to come close, there was a point-
defense weapon system based on the famous Goalkeeper
technology developed by the Dutch, with autocannon and
advanced radar concealed beneath false panels on the
foredeck. This was capable of firing seventy rounds per
second at a distance of up to 1500 meters. If necessary,
Scorpia was both willing and able to start a small war in
the heart of Paris.
The ship was called Le Débiteur, which might be trans-
lated as “someone who leaves without paying their debts.”
Such people used to be called fly-by-nights.
As Grendel had argued, there would be something
very calming about discussing business while cruising
past some of the most beautiful buildings in Europe, par-
ticularly when the business was as dangerous as theirs.
Sabotage. Corruption. Intelligence. And assassina-
tion. These were the four activities that had given Scorpia
its name. It was actually here in Paris that it had been
formed, a collection of intelligence agents from around
F l y - b y - N i g h t
41
the world who had seen that their services might no lon-
ger be needed after the end of the Cold War and who had
decided to go into business for themselves. It had been a
wise move. Secret agents are generally very badly paid.
For example, the head of MI5 in England receives only
two hundred thousand a year—a tiny amount compared
with any investment banker. Every member of Scorpia
had multiplied his annual income by a factor of ten. And
none of them paid any tax.
There were now twelve of them and they were all men.
There had once been a woman on the executive commit-
tee, but she had been killed in London and had never
been replaced. Altogether, six of them had died—one
from natural causes. The current chief executive was Zel-
jan Kurst, sitting at one end of the table in a charcoal gray
suit, white shirt, and black tie. As he had explained in
London, Scorpia had recently taken on four new re-
cruits—although they had been forced to look outside the
intelligence community. There was a ginger-haired
Irishman who called himself Seamus and had been with
the IRA. A pair of twin brothers had been brought in from
the Italian mafia. And finally there was Razim.
Scorpia was on the way up. That was the message they
wanted to make clear to the world. They were taking back
the control they should never have lost.
The twelve executives arrived individually and at five-
minute intervals, some in chauffeured cars, some on foot,
one even on a bicycle. Only Giovanni and Eduardo
42
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
Grimaldi, the twins, arrived together, but then, in twenty-
five years they had never spent a minute apart. At exactly
three o’clock, the deckhands lifted the anchor. The cap-
tain pushed forward on the throttle and Le Débiteur
slipped out onto the river, beginning its journey east to-
ward the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.
Zeljan Kurst waited until they were on their way be-
fore he spoke. He didn’t greet anyone by name. Such
matters were a waste of words. Nor did he offer anyone a
drink, not even a glass of water. None of these people
trusted each other, so they would only have refused it
anyway. If he had any recollection of his narrow escape
in London, he didn’t show it. His eyes were heavy. He
almost looked bored.
“Good day to you, gentlemen,” he began. As usual, the
English language sounded peculiarly ugly coming out of
his lips, but it had long since been agreed that English was
the only language they would speak. “We have come
together today to agree upon our tactics for an operation
that we have called Horseman and that will earn us the
sum of forty million dollars when it is successfully com-
pleted. As you all know, I have given the management of
this business to Mr. Razim.”
Kurst glanced sideways. As he had expected, there
was a brief flash of anger in the single eye of the agent,
Levi Kroll. This was the third time he had been passed
over for project command. Nobody else had no- ticed.
Their attention was fixed on the man with the silver
F l y - b y - N i g h t
43
hair and the round spectacles who had been placed, not
by accident, at the head of the table.
“I will add only that the first installment of the money
has been paid into our Cayman Islands account by our
client, Ariston Xenopolos,” Kurst continued. “We will re-
ceive the full amount on the same day that the so-called
Elgin marbles land on Greek soil.”
“How is Ariston?” Dr. Three asked. He was very small,
like many Chinese men, and as the years went by he
seemed to be getting smaller. He had recently completed
a two-thousand-page encyclopedia on the subject of tor-
ture. The writing had exhausted him although he had en-
joyed the research.
“He is critically ill,” Kurst replied. “According to his
doctors, he should already be dead.”
“And if he dies before our work is complete?”
“The money will still be paid.” Kurst blinked heavily,
as if to cut off any further discussion. “But it is not just a
question of money for us,” he went on. “This is a matter
of great importance. We have endured two failures in a
single year . . . unheard of in our long history. And I have
heard unpleasant whispers, gentlemen. There are some
governments and intelligence agencies that no longer
trust us with their assignments
. The col-
lapse of the
banking system in Singapore. Just three re- cent
operations that should have come to us but instead
have
been given to other organizations. We have to prove
44
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
to our clients that we are back at full strength—and this
is our opportunity! The work that we begin here today
will have echoes that will be heard and felt throughout the
world.”
He nodded in the direction of Razim. “Please. Tell the
committee what you have planned.”
“With great pleasure, Mr. Kurst.” Razim replied,
Pleasure was not a word he used often. It was not an
emotion that was familiar to him. And yet he had been
looking forward to this moment for a long time, and he
felt something close to a thrill to be the one holding the
reins, to be in command of the entire executive body of
Scorpia. “The Elgin marbles,” he muttered, his voice
barely audible above the drone of the motor. “The British
government has refused, time and again, to hand them
back. Why? Because they are selfish and arrogant. And the
question I have been asking myself for the last few months
is, what will make them overcome their selfishness and
arrogance? What will make them change their mind? And
the answer I have come up with is a single word. Fear.
“Somehow we have to arrange matters so that they
have no choice. We have to put them in a position where
they must return the sculptures . . . where their survival
depends on it. But at the same time, it has to be done very
delicately.
Razim drew a breath. There were twenty-one eyes in
the room and they were all turned on him. Outside, the
boat was cutting through the bright water, heading to-
ward a bend in the river with the Eiffel Tower and the
Fields of Mars looming up on the right. They passed un-
derneath a bridge, the Pont d’Iéna, and a bar of shadow
F l y - b y - N i g h t
45
swept briefly across the glass ceiling.
“I do not believe violence, or the threat of violence, is
the answer,” Razim went on. “But suppose we were to
arrange a trap for them. Imagine that we were to arrange
a scandal so dark and so shocking that it would destroy
their reputation for decades to come. No countries would
do business with them. The Americans would turn their
backs on them. The European community already hates
them, but this would be the final straw. Nobody would
trust them. Suddenly, Great Britain would be a very small
and lonely island indeed. Imagine all that, my friends,
and ask yourselves what the British government would do
to avoid it. Do you think, perhaps, they would agree to
empty one room in a stupid museum in the middle of
London? Would they cheerfully send a collection of old
statues back to their rightful owners? I think they would.
I really think they would.”
46
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
Razim longed for a coffee. He could feel the pack
pressing inside his jacket pocket—for today he was wear-
ing European dress—but he dared not reach for it. It
wasn’t that smoking was forbidden. It was just that it
might be considered a weakness.
“I have already put into operation a plan that will
achieve all this,” he said. “It is the sort of exercise that
carries the unmistakable stamp and authority of Scorpia.
And from what I have been told, I think it will give every-
one around this table a great deal of personal satisfaction
because, gentlemen, what I have in mind involves a young
boy . . .”
He paused for effect.
“The boy’s name is Alex Rider.”
There was a moment of perfect silence. Even the en-
gines seemed to have stopped. The last two words seemed
to have had a paralyzing effect on at least half the people
in the cabin.
“Alex Rider?” Sitting next to Kroll, the Japanese man
called Mr. Mikato raised a thumb to his lips and bit at the
nail. As he did so, he exposed the diamond set in his front
tooth. Mikato was a member of the criminal organization
known as the Yakuza and had tattooed the names of every
man he had killed across his body. Unfortunately, he had
run out of space. “We have encountered this boy twice,”
he began. “We even tried to kill him with a bullet fired
into his heart. The sniper that we hired had never failed—”
“Please, hear me out,” Razim interrupted. “I have
F l y - b y - N i g h t
47
given the matter a great deal of thought.” Suddenly he
decided—to hell with it. He took out his pack of Black
Devils and lit one with a solid gold lighter. Smoke curled
in front of his face, reflected in the two circles of his
glasses.
“I am perfectly aware that Alex Rider has, incredibly,
gotten the better of this organization on two occasions,”
he said. “There was a fairly simple affair involving the
creation of a tsunami to strike the coast of Australia. And
before that, the late Mrs. Rothman was responsible for
the operation called Invisible Sword. This was a secret
weapon using nanoshells with a cyanide core. The plan
was to poison every child in Britain.”
“We do not need to discuss these matters!” There was
a Frenchman at the table, a man with a neat gray beard
and the long, slender fingers of a pianist. He was rolling
his knuckles across the wooden surface, a sign of his
irritation.
“But we do need to discuss them, Monsieur Duval,”
Razim replied. “How can we understand our one weak
ness if we don’t examine it?” He waved a hand. “There is
absolutely nothing special about this child except that he
is a child. That’s the reason why he has been so useful to
MI6. Oh yes, he received some training from his uncle,
who was a spy himself before he was killed. But do you
really think a basic knowledge of karate and the ability to
speak a few foreign languages were the reasons he man-
aged to defeat you?
48
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
“That’s nonsense! Alex Rider won because you under-
estimated him. Winston Yu should have shot him when
he had the chance. And Mrs. Rothman too. Maybe they
hesitated because he was so young, but that was his
strength. He was the world’s most unlikely spy. It didn’t
matter if it was the island of Skeleton Key or Sayle En-
terprises in Cornwall, nobody looked at him twice. That
was their mistake.”
“And our mistake . . . ,” Kroll began. He had been lis
tening to all this in growing discomfort. Alone at the
table, he was allowing his emotions to get the better of
him. Zeljan Kurst had noticed this. It was what he had
expected.
“Let me finish!” Razim cut him off. “I have done a
great deal of research into this child. I managed to see a
copy of a report prepared by a journalist last year and it
confirmed what I had already found out for myself. On at
least six occasions—it may be more—he was employed by
the Special Operations Division of MI6. Gentlemen, I ask
you to consider the implications.
“Everyone in this room knows only too well that se
cret agents—spies—aren’t really heroes. The work they
do is often dirty and unpleasant. They kill people who
have to be killed and they do it without a second thought.
They have no pity and no sense of shame. They share the
sorts of secrets that nobody else wants to know. Do spies
have friends? Of course not. Nobody in their right mind
would want to get close to them. They cannot be trusted.
F l y - b y - N i g h t
49
“So what would happen if it was discovered that MI6
had recruited a fourteen-year-old schoolboy! Too young
to vote. Too young to smoke or get married. But old
enough to be sent to foreign countries, to get mixed up in
international politics, terrorism, and murder! What would
that say about that country’s government—or its secret
service?
“And let us take it one step further. Suppose the boy
was sent on a mission that went horribly wrong. But this
time it wasn’t something brave or clever. He wasn’t try
ing to save the world from some madman like Damian
Cray. He wasn’t protecting British children from a lethal
virus hidden inside a computer. No. This time, he was
involved in something that the entire world would con-
demn.” As Razim spoke, some of the people around the
table were becoming more alert, nodding as they followed
the thread of what he was saying. “And let us also imag
ine that during the course of this mission, the boy was
actually killed.” This brought smiles and a few murmurs
of approval. “Suddenly we have a situation. A fourteen
year-old is shot to death by the police in the streets of a
major city. There are documents in his pockets. Perhaps
he is carrying a gun that can be traced back to London.
All the evidence proves, beyond any doubt, that he was
working for MI6. Think for a minute what the result of
all this would be.”
“It would be covered up,” Mr. Mikato said. “There
isn’t a newspaper that would dare to print such a story.”
50
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
“Quite possibly. But we would have all the evidence.
Scorpia would have collected e-mails, phone intercepts,
photographs, voice recordings. We would have in our
hands a bomb that we could detonate at any time. And
the result would be that the reputation of the British gov-
ernment would be destroyed. It would be forced to dis-
mantle its own secret service. The prime minister would
resign. And no civilized country would want to do busi-
ness with Britain for decades to come.”
There was a long silence. By now Le Débiteur had
passed the Eiffel Tower and turned the corner past the
Quai d’Orsay. If anyone on the boat had looked out the
window, they would have seen the gardens of the Tuile-
ries stretching out on the right bank with the Louvre Mu-
seum just beyond. They would have seen couples strolling
on the paths between shrubs and fountains that had been
arranged so perfectly that it was as if they had been de-
signed by a mathematician rather than a gardener. But
nobody was interested in the view. They were all focused
on Razim, turning over what he had just said.
“Let me get this straight . . .” The man who had spo-
ken was fair haired, dressed casually in jeans and an
open-neck shirt. His name was Brendan Chase and he
had once been the paymaster for ASIS—the Australian
Secret Intelligence Service—until one afternoon when,
after dinner, he had boarded a plane with four hundred
thousand dollars of his agency’s money stuffed into his
backpack. “Somehow you’re going to persuade
F l y - b y - N i g h t
51
MI6 to send Alex Rider on a mission. You’re going to
make sure that the mission goes wrong and the boy is
killed. Well, I’m with you there. If you want a volunteer,
I’ll be glad to fire the bullet myself. You’re then going to
blackmail them. We have all the evidence. We have the
photographs and the recordings. We’ll make them public
unless you persuade your government to send the Elgin
marbles back to Greece. Is that about it?”
“You have expressed it with perfect clarity, Mr. Chase.”
“Okay. But this is what I don’t understand. How are
you going to do it? These photographs, for example. Are
you going to forge them? They’ll have to be pretty good
if they’re going to stand up to examination.”
“I don’t intend to forge anything.”
“So how are you going to get the British secret service
to play along?”
Razim tapped ash onto the surface of the table. His
fingernail was stained yellow with nicotine. “Any forgery
is out of the question,” he continued. “We have to be
cleverer than that. But actually I believe that it will be
perfectly possible for us to arrange all the pieces on the
board so that we control the entire game. At the moment,
gentlemen, we have the upper hand. British intelligence
has no idea of our intentions. And the truth is, they are a
great deal less intelligent than they might believe. Alan
Blunt has been in charge for too long. The same is true of
his deputy, Mrs. Jones. We have extensive files on the two
of them and I have been examining them closely.
52
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
There are certain patterns of behavior. That is to say, they
have become predictable. I think that it will be fairly sim-
ple to manipulate them. We will create a trap. And with a
little nudging and pushing, they will fall right into it.”
“Alex Rider is fifteen years old now,” Mr. Mikato said.
He had taken out a handkerchief and was fanning it across
his face. “As far as we know, MI6 is no longer using him.
Do you really believe that you can persuade them to
involve him again?”
“Certainly.” Razim replied. “All we have to do is
create the circumstances that will steer them toward that
decision.” “I heard that he refused to work for them
again,” Dr.
Three said.
“Alex Rider never had any real choice in the matter.
He never intended to be a spy in the first place, but he’s
been too valuable for MI6 to let him go. What this means
is that we don’t actually have to go anywhere near him. If
we provide them with the right sort of bait, MI6 will do
our work for us. They’re the ones we have to target.”
“What bait do you have in mind?” the Frenchman
asked.
Razim glanced briefly at Zeljan Kurst, as if asking for
his consent. The bald head nodded very slightly.
“It has to be done one step at a time,” Razim replied.
“Our first objective is to get Alex Rider out of England
and into a city of our choosing. Although he won’t be
aware of it, he will be entering a hall of mirrors, as if in
F l y - b y - N i g h t
53
an amusement park. Every move that he makes will be
controlled. Certain doors will be closed to him even as
others open up. He will be watched from every angle. But
as I say, we have to start with MI6. They are the ones who
will draw Alex into our trap.
“So let’s begin with the bait. Let’s say that a dead body
is found floating in the River Thames in London. The
body is that of a wanted criminal . . . a very impor- tant
criminal. MI6 has been searching for him for some time.
And in his pocket is a letter or some other docu- ment.
Of course, it’s in code. MI6 sends it to their best scientists
and they manage to work out what it means. That is when
they discover that an event is taking place in some distant
country and that it demands their urgent attention. It is
something of world-changing importance. An agent must
be sent there at once.”
“It could be any agent,” Mikato interrupted. “Why
should they choose the boy?”
“Because the event involves a field of activity in which
a child might pass unnoticed. This is the key to the whole
thing. I’ve already seen it in the files. The first time MI6
used Rider, it was because he could pass him- self off as
the winner of a competition in a computer magazine—
and this allowed him to infiltrate Herod Sayle’s
production plant in Cornwall. The next time, it was the
Point Blanc Academy in France, which he could enter as
a student, the teenaged son of a multimillion- aire. Then
he traveled with two American agents to the
54
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
island of Skeleton Key. This time he was pretending to be
their son and having him with them turned them into an
ordinary, happy family. Do you see? There is a pat- tern.
If a teenager is required, they have to choose Alex Rider.
There is no one else.”
Another pause. The Italian twins turned briefly to
each other and knew at once that they had come to the
same decision. Mikato’s face relaxed and he nodded
slowly. The Australian smiled to himself.
“Lakek et hatahat sheli!” If there was silent agreement
in the room, it was Levi Kroll spitting out the vile oath in
Hebrew that shattered it. Now he rose to his feet, ad-
dressing everyone around the table. “I do not believe
what I am hearing!” he roared. His face was livid, the
veins on his cheeks standing out. “This is madness. Lis
ten to me. I am not saying that this child is better than us.
I do not for a minute believe that he beat us for any other
reason than luck. However, let me tell you now that luck
has a part to play in our activities. You can plan every-
thing perfectly, but still a small, unforeseen detail can
destroy you. A chance meeting in the street. A gun jam-
ming. Bad weather! You know that this is true.
“And Alex Rider has the luck of the devil on his side.
How else do you explain the death of Julia Rothman—and
Nile, her second-in-command, for that matter? Major
Winston Yu was a genius. He ran the most successful
snakehead operation in the Far East. But when he came
up against Alex Rider, he died and his snakehead fell apart.
F l y - b y - N i g h t
55
There are a dozen ways we can persuade the British to
return these worthless statues! I like the idea of a nuclear
bomb. We could kidnap a member of the royal family,
maybe one of the princes, and send him back one piece
at a time until the government agreed to our demands. But
I will not agree to take on this child for a third time. Twice
was enough. We cannot risk a third humiliation.”
Kroll sat down, breathing heavily.
“Is there anyone else here who shares our colleague’s
concerns?” Zeljan Kurst asked.
Like poker players about to reveal their hands, the ten
other members of Scorpia eyed each other carefully, but
none of them spoke.
“I take it from your silence, then, that you all agree to
Mr. Razim’s plan?”
“But I disagree,” Kroll insisted, not waiting for an an-
swer. “And by our own rules, if we are not unanimous, we
do not proceed.”
Kurst seemed to consider this. “We might be unani
mous,” he purred.
“And how might that happen, Zeljan?” Kroll looked at
him curiously, daring him to provide an answer.
Nothing had changed. But the atmosphere inside the
conference room was suddenly brittle. The sound of the
engines shuddered in the air.
Zeljan Kurst shrugged, his huge shoulders rising and
falling a few inches. He ignored Kroll, turning instead to
Razim. “You suggested that a criminal might be found
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
floating in the Thames,” he said. “Might it not be more
convincing if it were a member of the executive commit-
tee of Scorpia?”
“I think that would be admirable,” Razim replied.
“Forget it!” Kroll was back on his feet again, and as if
by magic a gun had appeared in his hand. It was a 9mm
SP-21 military pistol, designed by Israel Military Indus-
tries. He couldn’t possibly have drawn it from a holster.
There must have been a spring mechanism inside his
jacket that had delivered it into his hand. He aimed it
directly at Zeljan Kurst. There was a wild look in his one
eye. “I suspected that you’ve been thinking of getting rid
of me,” he murmured. “I’m not surprised. I’ve given more
than twenty years to this organization and I knew the sort
of reward I could expect. The same reward as Max Gren-
del. Nobody retires from Scorpia, do they?” He laughed
briefly. “Maybe some of the rest of you should consider
what future you have here.”
The gun didn’t move, but his eye slid briefly toward
the twins and then back again.
“You’re not going to kill me, Zeljan. As you can see,
I’ve been prepared for this moment. You think Scorpia is
getting stronger? It’s not. It’s finished and the foolishness
I’ve heard today proves it. Well, I’m going to be the first
to walk out.”
Nobody reacted. It was unheard of for a gun to be
produced in the middle of an executive meeting. But they
were all confident. Kurst must have known. He must
surely have the situation under control.
F l y - b y - N i g h t
57
“You are going to order the captain to bring this boat
to the nearest bank and then I am going to leave,” Kroll
continued. “You don’t need to worry about me. I have no
interest in you anymore. But if any of you ever come after
me, I will have stories to tell that will have all of you in jail
for longer than any of you can possibly live. Do you un-
derstand me?”
Zeljan Kurst’s hands were under the table. Kroll didn’t
see his right hand stretch out and press a button in the
side of his chair.
“I said . . . do you understand me?”
“I completely understand you,” Kurst replied.
There was the soft tinkle of glass breaking. A hole had
appeared in the window just behind Kroll’s head.
Kroll jerked slightly but remained standing. A look of
puzzlement spread across his face.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Kurst spoke.
“You have been shot in the back of the neck, just above
the cervical curve,” he explained. “I’m afraid your spine
has been severed and you are, effectively, already dead.”
With an enormous effort, as if knowing this would be
the last movement he ever made, Kroll opened his mouth.
His hand, with the gun, remained frozen.
“At this moment we are passing the Paris Mint.” Kurst
glanced out the window. Sure enough, there was a hand-
some building with arches and columns stretching for
some distance along the waterfront. “I knew of course
that you were carrying a gun and suspected you might be
foolish enough to try and use it. So I took the precaution
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
of placing a sniper on the roof. Can you still hear me? I
would like to think that you have the consolation of
knowing that your death will not be wasted.”
Kroll’s legs gave way and he crashed down into his
chair, his head and shoulders slumping forward onto the
table. The hole in the back of his head was surprisingly
small.
“We will have to put Levi in the refrigerator until the
time comes to use him,” Kurst went on. “We do not want
to give away the time of his death. And whatever clue it is
that we place in his pocket, it will have to be something
very ingenious. We want to make MI6 work. The more
clever they think they are, the more easily they will fall
into our trap.” He glanced again at Razim. “There is
something else?”
“Yes.” Like everyone else in the room, Razim seemed
completely uninterested in the murder that he had just
witnessed. It was as if nothing had happened at all. “We
can manipulate MI6. And we can ensure that Alex Rider
is brought back into service. Once he is in our hands, it
will be a simple matter to kill him, although”—he smiled
to himself—“I hope you will allow me a little time with
him first. There is an experiment that I would like to try.”
“Just be careful,” the Frenchman said.
“Of course. But there is something else that we need
and that I didn’t have time to mention before our unfor
tunate interruption.” He glanced briefly at the dead man,
sprawled forward over the table. “Although I have said
F l y - b y - N i g h t
59
that we cannot forge the evidence, we nonetheless have
to be careful. We live in an age of disinformation. That is
to say, there isn’t a document or a report that anyone
trusts. People need to see things with their own eyes. We
are going to need to capture Alex Rider on film. I want to
be able to show him live on TV before he is discovered,
as it were, dead on TV. I want the whole world to be able
to see him in action.”
“And how will you manage that?” Dr. Three asked.
Not now. “Actually, it will be very simple,” he drawled.
“But it will require the assistance of someone very special
. . . someone quite unique. Fortunately, I was able to track
this person down and I have already been in
communication with him. He has every reason to wish
harm to Alex Rider. In fact, he hates Rider more than any
of us here.
“I have not yet been able to speak to him about Horse-
man, but I can assure you that he will be delighted to help
us. Although getting him to us is going to be expensive, I
have already put a team in place. It will be money well
spent.
“All being well, he should be with us at the end of the
week. And at that moment, Operation Horseman can
begin.”
4
P R I S O N E R 7
THE BOY WALKING ALONG the garden path and up to
the front door of the villa was fifteen years old, with light
brown hair that swept down over his eye. He had a thin,
rather pale face, well-defined cheekbones, and a slender
neck. He was wearing jeans, a black sports shirt, and
sneakers. Overall, he was slim, but he was also athletic
and had clearly spent time working out in the gym. His
arms and chest were almost too well developed for some-
one of his age. From the way he moved, it seemed that he
had all the time in the world. He was listening to music on
an iPod, the white cable snaking down to his back pocket.
It was a warm day with the sun beating down on the
well-kept lawn that stretched out on either side of the
path. There was a vegetable patch with onions and car-
rots already poking through and, curving behind it, an
old brick wall with pink climbing roses and passionflow
ers. The villa itself was built in the Spanish style with very
pale yellow weatherboarding and blue shutters. As he ap-
proached the door, the boy unplugged his earphones and
heard birdsong, along with the chug-chug-chug of an au-
tomatic sprinkler system. He stood still for a moment.
Close his eyes and he might be in some quiet corner of
England, perhaps a village in Dorset or Kent. But glanc-
P r i s o n e r
7
61
ing past the garden, he saw the razor-wire fence looming
above him. Two guards, both with automatic machine
guns, walked past. And once again he was reminded—as
if he needed reminding—that he was far from home, in
one of the strangest prisons in the world.
Certainly, it was a prison like no other. It had no
name. It was featured on no maps. Very few people even
knew it existed. The staff who worked there—from the
governor to the guards to the cleaners and the cook— had
been told that if they ever breathed a word about what
they did, they would end up in a cell themselves. The
facility had been built at a cost of several million dol- lars
and cost millions more to run, and yet—and this was the
most remarkable thing of all—it housed just seven
prisoners, each one in his own way so dangerous that
there was little chance they would ever be released.
This was the problem. There has been no capital pun-
ishment in the United Kingdom since 1963, so what was
the government to do with its worst enemies, the men
and women who had sworn to bring about its destruction
by any means? Of course, there were high-security pris-
ons such as Belmarsh in the east of London or a psychi-
atric hospital such as Broadmoor in Berkshire—but even
these weren’t considered secure enough for the handful
of special cases that had to be kept in almost total isola-
tion. These were people who couldn’t be allowed to tell
their stories. They couldn’t be killed. So they had to be
put somewhere where they might be forgotten.
62
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
And so the compound had been constructed. Not in
Britain. That was felt to be too close to home. Northern
Ireland had been considered. There were still prisons
there from the old days that could have been adapted. But
instead the overseas territory of Gibraltar had finally been
chosen, jutting out of the southern end of Spain. There
were plenty of good reasons for this. First of all, it was
still British soil. Surrounded by sea on three sides and
with a well-patrolled border on the fourth, it was virtually
a prison in itself. It was very quiet. Apart from the Span-
ish occasionally demanding that the land be given back,
most people would have been hard-pressed to point to it
on a map. And best of all, it was a base for both the Brit-
ish Armed Forces and the Royal Navy. There were al-
ready military buildings all over the peninsula. Who
would notice one more?
The prison was high up on the Rock and overlooked
the Bay of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean—or would
have if the walls, six yards high and one yard thick, hadn’t
gotten in the way. Electrified razor wire ran inside the
walls so that even if a prisoner managed to equip himself
with a ladder, perhaps constructed secretly in the prison
workshop, he wouldn’t be able to place it anywhere close.
The position of the fence had been chosen with care. It
couldn’t be seen from outside and there were no watch
towers, no armed guards on patrol. In other words, noth-
ing gave away the true nature of the complex. Nobody
lived nearby and passing residents and tourists believed
P r i s o n e r
7
63
that it was a naval communications center dealing with
satellite and Internet traffic.
Most of the security was invisible. There were almost
a hundred closed-circuit TV cameras and hidden micro-
phones so that prisoners were observed and listened to
from the moment they woke up . . . and even while they
were asleep. Movement sensors and thermal imaging
cameras provided data twenty-four hours a day so that
the guards could tell instantly where everyone was at any
time. The dozen cells (five unoccupied) were built on
solid rock so tunneling was out of the question, but more
sensor wires crisscrossed the floor underneath anyway.
No visitors were allowed. No letters were ever sent or
received. There was just one entrance and exit: a holding
area with an electronic gate at each end. Any vehicle en-
tering or leaving the prison was required to drive onto a
reinforced glass plate so that it could be examined and
searched from all sides before it was allowed to continue.
And yet, surprisingly, the prison was a very comfort-
able place. It was as if the British government had wanted
to convince the inmates that it wasn’t completely inhu-
mane. The various buildings scattered inside the walls
were low-rise, made of wood and brick. Apart from the
bars on the windows in the accommodation block, the
complex slightly resembled a vacation village, an impres-
sion heightened by the flower beds, olive and cypress trees,
and the sprinkler system dotted around the dusty, winding
paths. The warden’s villa was almost absurdly pretty. He
64
S C O R P I A R I S I N G
was a tough ex-army man, living there with his Spanish
wife. But his home could have come out of Disneyland.
Each prisoner had his own cell with a bed, a work
area, a TV, and a separate shower and toilet. There was a
library, a well-equipped gym, a wood and metal work-
shop, and a dining room. The other buildings included an
administration and residential block for the guards, a
central control room, and a punishment block. This was
a narrow corridor with three rooms built underground.
The rooms were soundproofed with no windows, but
they had seldom been used. There was no reason to cause
any trouble. And as escape was impossible, nobody had
ever tried.
Seven prisoners.
Two of them were terrorists, not the people who had
carried the bombs but the ones who had decided where
they should be placed. They had been captured while
planning a nuclear strike on London, and they had been
tried in secret and then brought to Gibraltar. Nobody was
ever to know how nearly they had succeeded. Two of
them were secret agents, spies working for foreign pow-
ers. They had managed to get deep inside the intelligence
services before they were unmasked, and again, in their
case, it was what they knew as much as what they were
that made them so dangerous. One man—the oldest in
the prison—claimed that he had been a weapons inspec-
tor in Iraq and was innocent of any crime. Nobody be-
lieved him. The sixth man was a freelance assassin. There
P r i s o n e r
7
65
were very few pages in his file. He had never revealed his
name, his nationality, his age, or the number of people he
had killed.
But it was the seventh prisoner, the fifteen-year-old
boy standing in front of the governor’s villa, who was
without doubt the most remarkable. In fact, he was almost
unique; not born but created, given a face that wasn’t his
own, taught how to kill—and quite, quite insane.
His name was Julius Grief and he had been one of the
sixteen clones created in a South African laboratory by
his natural father, Dr. Hugo Grief. A clone is an exact
copy of a human being, manufactured by taking a single
cell and cultivating it inside an egg. Julius had not only
never met his mother, he didn’t really have one. Until he
had been born, cloning had been restricted to laboratory
animals. The most famous had been Dolly the sheep. But
using technology that he had developed first at the Uni
versity of Johannesburg and later as minister of science,
Grief had cloned the first human beings: sixteen replicas
of himself.
They had all grown up together in the Point Blanc
Academy, a castle high up in the French Alps, near
Grenoble. Dr. Grief had been planning to take over the
richest and most powerful families on the planet by kid-
napping their teenaged sons and replacing them with
his own brood. One by one, the boys had been given
painful—and permanent—plastic surgery, making them
identical to their targets. None of them had complained.
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
This was the purpose of their entire life. This was what
they had been created for. They had never had proper
identities of their own. Even their names had been chosen
deliberately. Each one of them had been named after a
great world leader. Julius’s name had come from Julius
Caesar, the Roman emperor. And there had been other
boys named Napoleon, Ghengis, Mao Tse, and even (the
sixteenth) Adolf.
As things had turned out, Julius had been the last of
the boys to be given a new identity. He was going to be
Alex Friend, the son of Sir David Friend, a man who had
made a fortune from supermarkets and art galleries. He
was going to live in a huge house in Yorkshire, in the
north of England. He would go riding and shooting with
aristocratic friends. It was going to be amazing. And one
day, after he had murdered Sir David and his family, it
would all belong to him.
And so he had undergone the surgery. He had begun
to learn his new role—how to talk like Alex Friend, how
to walk like him, how to be him. And then, at the last
minute, he had discovered the terrible truth. The boy he
was watching day and night, the one he was modeling
himself on, was not Alex Friend at all. His real name was
Alex Rider and he was, incredibly, a spy working for Brit-
ish intelligence! Julius Grief had been given the wrong
face! The face of Alex Rider!
Worse was to follow. Alex had escaped from Point
Blanc, only to return at the head of an armed force. The
P r i s o n e r
7
67
school had been destroyed. Dr. Grief had been killed.
Julius had managed to escape and had tracked Alex down
to his school in Chelsea, but somehow, even though he’d
had surprise on his side and a loaded gun in his hand,
Rider had managed to get the better of him. Julius re-
membered the fight on the roof of the chemistry block.
The fire. Plunging down into the inferno. He could still
feel the burns that started at his neck and crisscrossed his
body all the way to his thighs. He’d spent two months in
the hospital and the pain would be with him for the rest
of his life. He was reminded of it every time he caught
sight of his reflection.
He still had Alex’s face.
It drove him mad. When he brushed his teeth in the
morning, there it would be, in the mirror, smiling back at
him. If he passed a window at night, the ghost of his
enemy would glide by beside him. After a heavy rainfall,
Alex Rider would look up at him from the puddles. There
were times when he wanted to tear his face off with his
own nails . . . In his early days at the prison he had tried
to do exactly that, leaving deep scratches down his fore-
head and cheeks. That was when they had decided he
needed psychiatric help. He was on his way to his next
appointment now.
Julius Grief reached out and rang the bell at the side
of the warden’s front door. He was expected, of course,
but it was against regulations to go in without ringing.
The bell sounded both inside the building and in the
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
control room at the front gate. A TV camera had already
picked him out and one of the guards was checking that
he was meant to be there. Yes. An eleven o’clock appoint-
ment. He was exactly on time.
The front door opened and a short gray-haired woman
looked out. As always, she was wearing dark colors with
a white shirt buttoned up to her neck and very little jew-
elry. She could have been the headmistress of a primary
school, perhaps in some remote English village. She was
in her mid-forties with a pinched face and a slightly
turned-up nose. Her name was Rosemary Flint and she
was a child psychiatrist. She had been meeting Julius
twice a week for the past six months, talking to him in the
living room of the warden’s house rather than in the li
brary or in his cell because she hoped the homey atmo-
sphere might help.
“Good morning, Julius,” she said. She had one of
those annoying voices that were always sweet and reason-
able. Somehow you knew that she would never lose her
temper.
“Good morning, Dr. Flint,” Julius replied.
“How are you today?”
“I’m very well, thank you.”
“Come in.”
They had spoken almost exactly the same words fifty
times and Dr. Flint noted that not once had the boy’s
expression ever changed. He was coldly polite. His eyes
were empty. She had never told Julius this, but part of her
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job was to decide if there was any chance that he could
one day be released and returned to society. After all, it
wasn’t entirely his fault that he was what he was. That
was how he had been made. Someone in British intelli-
gence hoped that he could be turned around and that one
day he might lead a normal life. But as far as Dr. Flint
was concerned, that day was still a very long way off.
She led him into the living room and gestured toward
a large, comfortable sofa covered with a fabric showing a
pattern of flowers. There was no need for the gesture.
Julius sat in the same place every time. The warden’s wife
liked flowers. The room had flowery wallpaper too, and
there was a vase of roses, cut from the garden, on a low,
dark wood table. The curtains were thick and kept out
much of the sunlight even when they were open. An an-
tique mirror had once hung on one of the walls, but Julius
had smashed it in the middle of his third session. The
warden hadn’t been pleased, but Dr. Flint had insisted
that there be no punishment. In her view, the boy wasn’t
responsible for his actions. She thought of him, at least in
part, as a victim. A painting—a view of Cadiz—now hung
in the mirror’s place.
“Would you like some orange juice, Julius?” Dr. Flint
asked.
“No, thank you,” Julius said. He never drank or ate
anything during these sessions. Dr. Flint had tried cook-
ies, chocolates, Coke, and cream cakes—all without suc-
cess. She knew exactly what was going on in his mind. To
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have taken anything would have been to give her power
over him. She might set the rules, but he was playing his
own game. One day, she hoped, he might accept a Jaffa
Cake. Then, at last, she would know that the healing pro-
cess had begun.
“So how has your week been?”
“I’ve had a very good week, thank you.”
“Are you reading anything from the prison library?”
“I’ve just started War Horse.”
“That’s excellent, Julius. You should try to read as
much as you can.” She smiled. “What’s it about?”
“It’s about some stupid horses that get killed in the
war.”
“Aren’t you enjoying it?”
“No. Not much.”
Dr. Flint sighed. The boy was lying. She knew every
book that he had borrowed and every book that he had
read. He was the only teenager in the prison and there
weren’t a great many things he could do with his time. He
devoured books. But when he was with her, he pretended
otherwise.
“Have you thought more about what we spoke about
last time?” she asked.
“We discussed a lot of things, Dr. Flint.”
“We were talking about anger management.”
“I’m not angry.”
“I think you are.”
Julius didn’t answer, but he could feel something
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burning white-hot inside him. It wasn’t anger. How could
this stupid woman describe it like that? It was like molten
lava flowing through his intestines. It was like acid. He
looked down deliberately, knowing that he would be un-
able to keep the emotion out of his eyes. Dr. Flint would
see it and she would write it down in that notebook of
hers. She wrote everything down as if she could even
begin to understand him. It was lucky that she couldn’t
see into his imagination. Julius dreamed of killing Alex
Rider. Slowly. Painfully. He should have done it on the
school roof a year ago. He had come so close.
And he might yet get another chance. For a brief sec-
ond, Julius thought about the note he had found the night
before. It had been waiting for him, hidden in his room . . .
incredibly, impossibly. He had read it so many times that
he knew every word by heart—but he quickly forced it out
of his mind. The woman was still examining him. He
didn’t dare give anything away.
“I thought we might try some word association today,”
Dr. Flint said.
“Whatever you say, Dr. Flint.” It was her favorite
game. She said one word. He had to say another, in-
stantly, without any thought. It was supposed to demon-
strate what was going on in his mind.
“Right.” She looked around her. “I’m going to start
with something very ordinary. You know what to do.”
There was a pause. Then she began.
“Dog.”
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“Bone.”
“Kitchen.”
“Knife.”
“Handle.”
“Blade.”
“Grass.”
“Dead body.”
Dr. Flint stopped. “I don’t understand the associa
tion,” she said. “When you said ‘blade,’ I said ‘grass’ be
cause I was thinking of a blade of grass.”
“And when you said ‘grass,’ I thought of burying
someone underneath it.”
“Who do you want to bury, Julius?”
Julius didn’t answer. They both knew whom he had
in mind.
“Let’s try again,” Dr. Flint said. For the first time in
her career, she was beginning to wonder if there was any
point in this. She had been working with this child for
months and she had made no progress at all. She touched
her lip. “Mouth.”
“Throat.”
“Drink.”
“Poison.”
“Bottle.”
“Message.”
“Letter.”
“Bed.”
She stopped a second time. “That was a little better,”
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she said. “You were thinking of a message in a bottle, I
suppose. But why did you say ‘bed’?”
Julius was cursing himself. He couldn’t get the mes
sage out of his head. He had found it under his pillow
when he went to bed. Someone must have placed it there
during the day. And now he had almost let it slip out of
his mouth, throwing out words without thinking.
“Actually, I’ve got a slight headache. Do you mind if
we don’t play this anymore?” he asked.
“Of course, Julius. Do you want to have a rest?” “No,
Dr. Flint.” Only a few minutes of the session had
passed. They still had a whole hour together. Julius won-
dered if he would be able to get through it without
screaming at her or even trying to break her neck. He had
thrown himself at her once, early on in his therapy, and
after he’d been dragged off, they’d put him in the punish-
ment block for a week. That couldn’t happen now. The
message. The secret friends. They wouldn’t keep him
waiting long. He just had to hold everything together
until the right time.
“All right. Why don’t we draw some pictures together?
I’d like you to draw some imaginary place, and then you
can take me through it and tell me what you can see.”
Julius had an imaginary place. It was a forest with Alex
Rider hanging from every tree. A whole world of Alex
Riders, each one of them suffering in a different way.
“Can I draw an amusement park?” he asked.
“Of course, Julius.”
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Even as he picked up the child’s crayon that had been
supplied for him, he thought about the moment he had
lifted the pillow and seen the single folded sheet of paper
beneath. He had known at once that it was something
special. Nobody ever came into his room when he wasn’t
there. The other prisoners weren’t allowed. The guards
and the cleaners made a point of asking his permission.
He had unfolded it and read:
WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS. WE ARE PREPARING TO
HELP YOU ESCAPE FROM THIS PLACE. GO TO
THE LIBRARY TOMORROW AT TWELVE O’CLOCK
AND YOU WILL FIND FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
The words had been neatly typed. Instead of a signa-
ture there was a little emblem printed in silver at the
bottom of the page.
A scorpion.
Julius had read the note a dozen times, then crumpled
it
into a ball and swallowed it with a cup of water he had
drawn from the tap. After that he had gone to bed—but
he hadn’t slept.
WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS.
Who? He had no friends. Could it be some of his
brothers? Julius had never found out what had happened
to them after the Point Blanc Academy had been shut
down but had assumed that they were, like him, prison-
ers. Perhaps he had been contacted by people who had
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known his father. They might be from the old South
Africa . . .
TOMORROW AT TWELVE O’CLOCK . . .
Tomorrow was now today. It was already ten past
eleven. Just fifty minutes to go. Julius Grief forced the
image of Alex Rider (with a kitchen knife in his chest, his
bones exposed, lying in the grass, under the grass) out of
his mind and began to draw a merry-go-round. Dr. Flint
watched him and of course she didn’t know. Nobody
knew.
This was the day he was going to escape.
5
O V E R T H E E D G E
THE LIBR ARY WAS THE MOST modern building in the
prison, and although it was unusually small and compact,
it could have been lifted out of almost any provincial town
in England. It was low-rise with red bricks and sliding
glass doors and contained about three hundred books—
half in English, half in Spanish—for the guards and their
families used it too. There was a desk where books had
to be signed in and out, a newspaper and magazine sec-
tion (although all the publications were carefully cen-
sored), then the books themselves, divided into the usual
classifications. The crime and horror sections were the
most popular with the prisoners. New books appeared
occasionally, mainly sent in by charities. When Julius
Grief had arrived, the warden had personally set up a
children’s section, purchasing the first books—a com-
plete collection of Roald Dahl—with his own money.
Julius Grief walked over as soon as his session with Dr.
Flint was over, crossing the open space where some of the
other prisoners were enjoying the sun, sitting on rickety
chairs between the trees. The two terrorists were playing
Scrabble. As Julius walked past, one of them noticed him
and nodded vaguely in his direction.
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The assassin was nearby, reading a celebrity mag- azine,
circling some of the heads with a black felt-tip pen. The
other prisoners didn’t really like having a teenager
among them. It offended their sense of dignity.
Julius had to force himself not to hurry. He knew that
his every movement was being watched and that any
strange behavior, any indication that he was planning
something would be reported immediately. He actually
hesitated before he went into the library, as if he wasn’t
sure whether he needed a book or not. Then he made up
his mind and passed through the glass doors.
“Buenos días, Julius.” The librarian was a Spaniard
who also worked in the prison accounts office. His name
was Carlos and he was plump and good-natured, dressed
in the same uniform as the guards, an olive green shirt
and dark trousers. “You are coming to the talk tonight?”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Julius said.
There were occasional talks in the library, given by the
prisoners or by the guards. Two weeks ago, one of the
secret agents had given an hour’s lecture on the Cold
War. Tonight, the chef was demonstrating his mother’s
recipe for paella.
“What brings you here today?” Carlos asked.
“I’ve come to borrow a book.”
Carlos glanced at his computer screen. “But you al-
ready have three books in your cell.”
“I know. But I’ve finished two of them. And I’m not
enjoying the third . . .”
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Julius walked toward the bookshelves, feeling the li-
brarian’s eyes boring into his back. What exactly was he
looking for? The note had told him to come here . . . he
would find further instructions. But apart from Carlos,
there was no one else in the building. Would there be a
second letter hidden somewhere here—and if so, how
was he meant to find it? He decided to head for the chil
dren’s section. After all, that was where “they” would
have expected him to go.
He stopped in front of the shelves. The Dahl collec-
tion stretched from one side to the other. Julius had never
read any of it, although he had once come upon one of
the The Fantastic Mr. Fox. As far as he could see, nothing
had changed since his last visit. He could even make out
the gaps where he had pulled out his own choice of books.
And then he saw it. One new book, lying flat on its
side. A fat, dusty-looking hardback called Wildlife in
Gibraltar: Volume 2—Birds and Insects. It shouldn’t have
been here. It should have been on the other side of the
room, in Natural History. But that wasn’t what had
caught his eye. It was the cover. There was a picture of an
insect that seemed to be gazing at him with its tiny eyes.
It couldn’t just be a coincidence.
It was a scorpion—the same creature that had ap-
peared on his note.
He glanced around. Carlos was sitting, tapping at his
keyboard. The librarian seemed to have forgotten him.
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But there were still cameras mounted in all four corners
of the room. They would be watching him from the con-
trol room beside the gate. Julius put on a performance for
their benefit. He took out one book, then another—as if
considering which one to read—then finally lifted the
wildlife volume and carried it over to a table.
He had chosen the position carefully. The table was
right next to a shelf, which screened it from the cameras.
Carlos could still see him. But he was fairly certain that
the book was out of sight. Very carefully, he opened it.
And gasped. How could this have happened? Nobody
knew about the prison. Nobody could possibly infiltrate
it. And yet there it was in front of him. The pages of the
book had been cut out to provide a hiding place for a gun,
a Mauser C96 automatic pistol with the barrel shortened
to allow it to fit. Julius ran a finger over the cold metal.
He had been taught to shoot when he was six years old
and had killed for the first time when he was nine. But it
had been a long time since he had held a gun in his own
hands, and he had thought he would never have one
again. For just one moment he felt an urge to pick it up,
to turn around and shoot Carlos in the head. But that was
crazy. He had to be careful, do this one step at a time.
There was a second note folded into the book. It was
much longer and more detailed than the message he had
received the night before. Julius read it very carefully.
Whoever was helping him, these were serious people. He
knew he couldn’t make a mistake. Finally, when he was
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ready, he closed the book and got up. It was half past
twelve, exactly the right time. He knew what he had to do.
The subject has made no progress at all since his arrival
in Gibraltar. It is clear that Julius Grief has a pathological
hatred for Alex Rider that is deep-rooted and permanent.
And yet, at the same time, surgery has made him identical to
the object of his hate. It must surely follow that subconsciously,
some of that hatred must be directed against himself. In my
view, there is a very real danger that this psychological
turmoil could drive Grief over the edge and that he
could
plunge into depression, suicide, or total nervous breakdown.
Indeed, it is surprising that it hasn’t happened yet.
Dr. Flint looked at what she had just written and felt
a deep sense of gloom. She had been working with dam-
aged children for her entire professional life, but she had
never met anyone like Julius Grief. On the one hand, she
wanted to feel sorry for him. He wasn’t responsible for
what he had become. He had been manipulated from the
moment he was born—in fact, even his birth had been
manipulated. He was a freak, created for one purpose
only: to help his father take over the world. She had read
the file on Hugo Grief and it had made her shudder. All
sixteen boys had been drip-fed a diet of hatred and insan-
ity, and all of them (apart from two who had died) had
ended up in institutions like this, locked up for the rest of
their lives. It wasn’t their fault.
And yet no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t
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avoid the fact that she had a deep dislike for Julius. She
knew it was unprofessional, but at the same time it was
almost instinctive. He was a horrible person. And she
wasn’t fooled by him either. Although he went along with
her methods—the discussions, the word association, the
different psychological tests—she knew he was toying
with her. And he was keeping something back. Even this
morning she had been aware of it. He had tried to hide
what he was thinking in his expressionless face and his
flat, formal answers. But there had been moments when
she sensed it, flickering in the corner of her eye like a
moth in candlelight. There was something he wasn’t tell-
ing her. She wondered if she should mention it to the
warden but decided against it. She was the boy’s thera
pist. She had to respect his confidentiality. She went back
to her notes.
I recommend that Julius be put back on medication with
immediate effect. Although I do not like drugging young
people, I feel that in his case—
The doorbell rang. That was surprising. The warden
never came back before two o’clock, and his wife was out
for lunch. Dr. Flint went over to the small television
screen in the hallway and saw a black-and-white image of
Julius standing outside, holding a bunch of flowers that
he must have picked himself in the prison garden. She
was tempted not to open the door. He shouldn’t be here.
It was against regulations. She remembered how he had
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tried to attack her in one of her first sessions with him.
And then there had been the time when he had gone ber-
serk and smashed the mirror. She should tell him to go
away.
But then she reconsidered. All that had been a long
time ago, and maybe he really was trying to make amends
for his behavior that morning. Maybe he had come to tell
her what was on his mind. The flowers were a sweet
touch. And anyway, there were dozens of cameras that
would be trained on him even now. There was no danger.
She opened the door.
“What is it, Julius?” she asked.
“It’s a bit difficult to explain, Dr. Flint.”
“Do you want to come back inside?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I’d like you to come with me.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“We’re leaving here—together.”
He dropped the flowers and there it was, in his hand,
pointing at her. Dr. Flint stared in shock. Julius Grief was
holding a gun, his finger curled around the trigger, a
glazed look in his eyes. It was like something out of a
nightmare. First, it made no sense at all. How could he
possibly have gotten a gun? And yet at the same time
there was something horribly inevitable about it. Julius
was managing to contain his excitement. He was in total
control. Dr. Flint knew that if she didn’t do exactly what
he said, he would shoot her without a second thought.
He stepped forward and suddenly the gun was at her
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throat and his face was close to hers and she could feel
the madness as if she had been slapped with it. He was as
tall as her and a great deal stronger. He was armed. For
the first time since she had known him, his face had
cracked into something resembling a smile. Suddenly he
was no longer fifteen and the good looks that the plastic
surgeon had given him were twisted out of shape. He
could have been fifteen or he could have been fifty. Evil
has no age. Dr. Flint was terrified. Had she really spent
the last six months, twice a week, on her own with this
monster?
“I’m going to walk out of here,” Julius said, and his
voice was soft even if it was on the edge of hysteria.
“Walk, walk, walk, walk. And you’re going to help me.”
“They’ll never let you through the gate.”
Julius pressed the gun into the side of her neck, the
sawed-off muzzle pointing upward. “Then they’ll be
scraping your brains off the fence,” he told her. “Shall we
go, Dr. Flint? I think we should.”
They walked together like two friends performing
some strange sort of dance. Dr. Flint was looking straight
ahead, her head tilted, her eyes still staring. Julius was
enjoying himself. The feel of the gun in his hand was giv-
ing him strength. He loved the way the hard steel pressed
into the woman’s flesh. For months he had endured her
stupid questions, her endless games. Now, at last, he was
the one in command.
Despite all the cameras, Julius Grief and Dr. Flint had
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almost reached the first gate, the entrance to the holding
area, before anyone realized that something was wrong.
Perhaps they thought it was some sort of exercise, part of
the therapy, but then at last someone saw the gun and
realized what was actually going on. At once, long-
rehearsed emergency procedures sprang into life. A dozen
sirens went off, their combined sound echoing all over
the peninsula. Guards burst out of doorways, their weap-
ons ready. The other prisoners were rushed, at gunpoint,
back into their cells. An automated phone message had
been sent instantly to the Devil’s Tower Camp, home of
the Royal Gibraltar Regiment close to the airport, calling
for immediate backup, and before Julius had even had a
chance to make his demands, half a dozen Land Rovers
were speeding out of the garrison and beginning the long
climb uphill.
For a moment, everything froze. It was as if the en-
tire compound had become a photograph of itself. Julius
Grief was still holding on to Dr. Flint, one hand on her
shoulder, the other—with the gun—pressing against her
neck. He was surrounded by rifles and automatic ma
chine guns. They were aiming at him from every direc-
tion. The sun was beating down, glinting off the razor-wire
fence. Somewhere outside the prison, there was a brief
chatter of laughter as one of the island’s famous apes
swung itself off the branch of a tree and disappeared into
the undergrowth.
Then the warden appeared. He was a short, muscular
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man with silver hair cut short, dressed in army fatigues.
He had been in the control room when the alarm was
sounded. He stopped in the holding area on the other
side of the gate.
“Grief!” he barked. He had been in the Royal Navy for
twenty years. He had the sort of voice that was used to
being obeyed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Open the gate or I’ll put a bullet in her.” Julius was
loving this. He could feel the world spinning around him.
“I’ll kill her. I promise.”
“Where did you get the gun?”
A stupid question. Julius wasn’t going to answer it.
“Five seconds,” he called out.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Four . . .”
The warden had to make a decision. He had no doubt
at all that Grief would use the gun. He could see that
Rosemary Flint was terrified. The guards were waiting
for his command, but he couldn’t let them fire, not unless
they wanted to kill the woman too. How could the boy
have possibly gotten hold of the weapon? Was it even a
real one? He couldn’t take the risk of finding out. Dr.
Flint was a civilian. Her safety came first.
“Three seconds, warden.”
Right now, the boy had the upper hand. But that would
change on the other side of the prison gates. Backup
would already be on its way and Julius Grief hadn’t actu-
ally worked it out properly. He had nowhere to go. He
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was high above the main city and harbor with narrow
lanes and hairpin bends all the way down. He wouldn’t
be able to keep Flint close to him all the time, and even if
he made it to the bottom, there was no way he could leave
the peninsula. Nobody was going to let him get on a plane
or a ship. The Spanish border authorities would already
have been alerted. Everything was on the warden’s side.
Once Grief was out, it would be easy to pick him off.
“Open the gate!” Julius shouted. His face was deathly
pale. His arm and the hand with the gun were rigid. Even
if someone did shoot him, he would still manage to kill
Dr. Flint before he died.
“Do what he says!” the warden called out.
For another second nothing happened, as if the guards
couldn’t believe what they had just heard. Then there was
a click and the heavy gate began to roll aside. Julius
grabbed hold of Dr. Flint’s collar and began to drag her
forward, the two of them moving side by side. The guns
followed them into the holding area.
The inner gate slid shut and they were trapped inside
a pen with fences on three sides of them, the control
room on the fourth. The warden had retreated, as if try-
ing to get as far away from them as possible. A young
guard stared at them from behind a plate glass window.
Nothing like this had ever happened at the prison before.
“Julius,” Dr. Flint rasped. It was hard for her to talk
with the gun pressed against her throat. “Don’t do this.
It’s not going to work.”
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“I would very much enjoy pulling this trigger,” Julius
replied. “In fact, I’d love it. So if I were you, I’d shut up,
Dr. Flint. Don’t give me the excuse.”
The second gate opened, and for the first time in
twelve long months, Julius was able to see the little olive
groves, the scattered boulders, and the wild grass on the
other side of the walls. In the distance he glimpsed the
Mediterranean, a twisting ribbon of blue.
“Off we go!”
He forced Dr. Flint forward. This was the critical mo-
ment. He knew that as soon as he had left the prison, he
would have to get rid of her. She would only slow him
down. But that would be when he was most exposed. The
guards wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. Julius was putting all
his trust in the people who had sent him his instructions—
and he still had no idea who they were. If they had tricked
him, if they had failed to deliver, he would be killed. But
in a way he didn’t care. Better this one minute of freedom
than a life behind bars.
The two of them had passed through the outer gate
and now the prison was behind them. Julius Grief had
been brought here in a blacked-out van, so he had never
seen the view. A narrow track ran downhill past some
small concrete buildings like pillboxes from the last war.
The ground was dusty and covered in pine needles. He
could smell pine and eucalyptus in the air. There was
nobody in sight, but the letter in the book had warned
him that he would have only five minutes before the Royal
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Gibraltar Regiment Land Rovers reached him. He had to
move fast.
He swung his hand, cracking the Mauser across Dr.
Flint’s head. The woman cried out and fell to her knees,
blood pouring down the side of her face. Julius twisted
around and fired three shots at the prison gates, the bul-
lets ricocheting off the brickwork. He hadn’t hurt any
one, but it would give them something to think about.
Certainly nobody would choose to come running out in
the next few seconds, and he needed all the time he could
get.
He began to run down the hill. He had kept himself fit
while he was in prison, not because he had anywhere to
go but because that was how he had been brought up. His
father, Hugo Grief, had insisted on six hours of exercise
a day, starting with a two-mile run through the snow.
They had learned martial arts. They knew how to kill.
And he had taught them how to drive.
The car was waiting exactly where the letter had said
it would be, parked just off the lane behind a cluster of
the date palm trees that were dotted all over Gibraltar. It
was a small SUV, a Suzuki Jimny, cheap and boxlike and
covered in dust. One fender was crumpled. The driver’s
mirror was cracked. To look at, it could have been aban-
doned, but the door was unlocked and the keys were in
the ignition. Julius scrambled inside. At the same time, he
heard a car rush past on the lane, heading downhill from
the prison. Fortunately, the driver hadn’t seen him. Some-
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body shouted. The guards were spreading out on foot as
well. It wouldn’t take them long to find him. He slammed
the door and turned the key.
The 1.3 cylinder engine rattled noisily to life. The
guards wouldn’t expect him to have a car, but they must
have heard the sound and would know—if they hadn’t
already guessed—that every aspect of this escape had
been planned, with help from outside. Julius jammed the
gear into reverse, then shot out onto the lane, the wheels
spinning and sending out clouds of dust. The Suzuki was
cramped and handled badly. It would struggle to get
around the curves. Still, it was better than walking.
A shot rang out, slamming into the bodywork just
above the rear tire. One of the guards had seen him. Julius
shoved the gearshift into first and accelerated. The Su
zuki leapt forward even as the guard fired again, his sec
ond shot splintering the branch of a nearby tree. Julius
was hunched over the wheel. There was another guard on
the lane ahead of him. How had he gotten there so fast?
As he brought his gun around, Julius floored the accel
erator pedal. For a brief second the guard filled the front
window. Then the car hit him and there was a sickening
thud as he was thrown into the air, the gun spinning out
of his hands.
Julius was ten yards down the road before the man hit
the ground. There were two prison jeeps behind him. He
could see them in his rearview mirror. They were faster
than the Jimny, getting closer by the second. If he hadn’t
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been driving downhill, they would already have caught
him. Just ahead, the lane curved steeply to the right. He
spun the wheel and suddenly he was on the very edge of
the hillside with a sheer drop of a hundred yards. He saw
the huge rocks and the sea far below. At the same time,
he felt the tires slipping off the track, grit and loose peb-
bles spraying out. He fought with the steering wheel,
forcing the Suzuki back under his control. By the time he
had rounded the corner, he had put some distance be-
tween himself and the pursuing vehicles—but he had al-
most killed himself too.
The next corner was easier. It bent to the left so that
this time the car was hugging the cliff face, away from the
sea. Even so, Julius miscalculated and there was an explo-
sion of glass and plastic as one of the mirrors disinte-
grated against a rocky outcrop. The jeeps were catching
up again too, and looking ahead, he could see the fleet of
Land Rovers belonging to the Royal Gibraltar Regiment
climbing toward him.
There was no way down. There was no way back. The
next hairpin bend and a sheer drop to certain death were
straight ahead.
Julius wrenched the wheel to the right. The driver of
the nearest jeep saw the Suzuki leave the road, weaving
across a patch of scrubland toward a dilapidated barn.
The boy was out of control. He tried to steer the car back
onto the track but instead smashed straight into the barn
door, disappearing in a blast of shattering wood. For the
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next few seconds, the car was out of sight, inside the
barn, but then it reappeared, breaking through the other
side, the hood crumpled, the front window now a spider’s
web of cracks. Julius Grief could only be glimpsed, star-
ing out with a rictus smile, his light brown hair sweeping
down over his eyes, his hands glued to the steering wheel.
There was nowhere to go. The cars from the barracks
had almost arrived and were taking up positions lower
down the hill, blocking the way. With the rocks on one
side and the drop on the other, there was no way to get
past.
Julius didn’t even try. Perhaps he couldn’t see. Per
haps he had been concussed when he hit the barn door.
He didn’t even attempt to steer the car, tearing dead
straight across the scrubland, rejoining the track, then
continuing over it. As the horrified prison drivers skidded
to
a halt, the Suzuki reached the other side of the track,
smashed through a barbed-wire fence, and launched it-
self into the void. Briefly it hung in the air. Then it
plunged down, following the sheer edge of the Rock in a
long, terrible descent toward the sea. About halfway down
it hit a boulder. There was a single explosion as it burst
into flames, somersaulted, then continued on its way. It
was upside down when it hit the water. For a moment it
rested there, the flames licking upward as if trying to set
the sea alight. Then it sank. A few pieces of broken metal
rolled down the hillside. Apart from that, there was noth-
ing left.
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The nearest Land Rover came to a halt and the driver
got out. Gradually, more guards appeared, hurrying across
the grass to peer over the edge, beside the broken fence.
Below them and to one side, the city of Gibraltar lay spread
out, the high-rises facing the sea. The Mediterranean itself
was a brilliant blue, the sun throwing a million shimmering
reflections across the surface.
“Did you see that?” someone asked.
“Poor thing!”
“You think he did it on purpose? He didn’t even try to
get back on the road.”
“He could still be alive.”
“Forget it. Nobody could have survived that. He’ll
have drowned . . . if he didn’t burn to death first.”
“Poor sod. And he was only fifteen.”
There would have to be an inquiry, of course. The
most critical question would be—how had the gun been
smuggled into the prison? One of the guards must have
been bribed . . . but which one? And which organization
had been behind the attempted escape? How had they
even known about the existence of the prison in the first
place? An ambulance was already on its way to take Dr.
Flint to St. Bernard’s Hospital in the middle of Gibraltar
city. As the last person to see Julius Grief alive, she might
be able to fill in a few details. The warden would have to
fly to London, to report at the highest level. There would
be severe reprimands all around and an inevitable tight-
ening of security.
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There were now six prisoners instead of seven. Julius
Grief was dead and although frogmen would be sent to
the seabed, there was very little chance that much or any
of his remains would be discovered in the wreckage of the
car. Well, he wouldn’t be missed. He was only a kid, but
he was a mad kid. None of the other prisoners had liked
him. Perhaps it was better this way.
And nobody knew the truth.
The trick had been played inside the old barn, during
the few seconds when Julius Grief had been out of sight.
As he had been instructed, he had driven into the build-
ing, smashing through a door that had been specially
weakened for just this purpose. A whole team of Scorpia
agents—six of them—had been waiting for him inside the
barn, and as he skidded to a halt, a second, identical
Suzuki Jimny had burst out the other side. But this one
had no driver. It was radio controlled with a dummy Ju-
lius strapped to the wheel, almost invisible behind all the
cracks. It didn’t have to travel very far. In fact, it had been
a simple task to guide it across the open patch of land,
through the fence, and over the edge.
And while the guards were watching the fall and the
explosion, the Scorpia team had got to work. The original
Suzuki had been hastily covered with a tarpaulin and then
with straw. Julius had been led to a pit constructed in the
floor with a trapdoor sliding across. There was enough
room for him and all the agents to bundle in together, and
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within seconds they had all disappeared. If anyone from
the prison had thought to look inside the barn after the
crash, they would have found it to be quite empty and
abandoned with a few bits of old machinery, a haystack,
and some moldy bags of animal feed.
But nobody did. Everything had happened exactly as
Scorpia had intended. As far as the world was concerned,
Julius Grief was dead. And nobody was watching that
night as a fishing boat with a single smiling passenger
slipped out of Gibraltar harbor beneath a full moon and
a starry sky and began its journey south.
6
S E C R E T S A N D L I E S
THE REPORT WAS MARKED TOP SE CRET with the two
words stamped on the cover in red ink, but in fact there
was no need for them. Only three copies had been printed,
one for Alan Blunt, the head of MI6 Special Opera- tions,
one for his deputy, Mrs. Jones, and one for the chief
science officer, and since almost everything they did was
secret in one way or another anyway, they hardly needed
to be told. Sometimes Blunt wondered how many tens of
thousands of documents had passed across the polished
surface of his desk, here on the sixteenth floor of the
building that called itself the Royal and General Bank on
Liverpool Street in London. Each one of them had told
its own dirty little story. Some of them had led nowhere,
while others had demanded instant action. An operation
might be set up on the other side of the world, an agent
sent out to run it. How many people had died on the turn
of a page?
But there wouldn’t be many more files coming his
way. Alan Blunt sat back in his chair and looked around
him, his mind still sifting through the details of what he
had just read. He had occupied this office for seventeen
years and could have described it with his eyes closed—
right down to the last paper clip. It was simply furnished
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with an antique desk and a scattering of chairs on a neu-
tral carpet, two paintings on the walls—landscapes that
were barely worth examining—and a shelf full of refer-
ence books that had never been opened. Rooms tell a lot
about the people who occupy them. Blunt had made sure
that this room said nothing at all.
And soon he would be leaving it. The new prime min-
ister had decided that it was time to make changes, and
the entire department was being reorganized. Blunt still
didn’t know who would be taking his place, but he rather
suspected it might be Mrs. Jones. She hadn’t said any
thing to him, of course, nor would he have expected her
to. He very much hoped that she would be promoted. She
had been recruited straight from Cambridge University,
bringing with her a first-class degree in political science.
There had been tragedies in her life—the loss of her
husband and two sons—but she had risen above them.
She had a brilliant mind. Blunt wondered if the prime
minister would be smart enough to recognize her talents.
He had thought of sending a memo to 10 Downing Street
but had decided against it. They could make the decision
for themselves.
What did the future hold for him? Blunt was fifty
eight years old, not quite retirement age. He would cer-
tainly be given a knighthood in the New Year’s Honors,
his name appearing between celebrities and civil servants.
“For services to government and inland security.” It
would be something nice and bland like that. He might be
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offered the directorship of a bank, a real one this time. He
had once considered writing a book, but there was no real
point. He had signed the Official Secrets Act, and if you
took the secrets out of his life, there would be nothing
left.
Briefly, he found himself examining the empty chairs
opposite him. Blunt was not an emotional man, but he
couldn’t stop himself from remembering some of the men
and women who had sat there. He had given them their
orders and they had gone, often not to return. Danvers,
Wilson, Rigby, Mortimer, and Singh . . . who had done so
well in Afghanistan until his cover had been blown. And
John Rider. Blunt would never have dreamed of say- ing
so, but he had always had a special regard for the agent
who had finally been assassinated on the orders of
Scorpia just as he was leaving for the south of France
with his young wife. John Rider had been a much more
effective agent than his younger brother, Ian.
And then, of course, there was Alex Rider, who had in
many ways surpassed them both. Blunt half smiled to
himself. He had known from the very start that there was
something special about the fourteen-year-old, and he
had refused to listen to the voices that had insisted it was
mad to bring a schoolboy into the world of espionage.
Alex had been the perfect weapon because he was so un-
expected, and he had done something that very few other
agents had achieved. He had been sent out on eight mis-
sions and he had survived.
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In a way, though, Alex had been the cause of Blunt’s
undoing. When the prime minister had found out that
MI6 was using not just a teenager but one who was under
sixteen, he had hit the roof. It was against every rule in the
book. The public would have been horrified if the facts
had ever leaked out, and of course the prime minister
would have shared some of the blame even though it had
nothing to do with him. Blunt had no doubt that Alex was
the reason he had been asked to step down. He had also
been told in no uncertain terms that Alex was not to be
sent out again, or to be replaced. So that was that. In a
way, Blunt was glad. He had seen enough body bags. It
would have been difficult to look at one that was half sized.
The file . . .
Very unusually, Blunt had let his mind wander. He
forced himself to focus once again. Forty-eight hours
ago, a body had been found floating in the River Thames,
just to the east of Southwark Bridge. The body was that
of a middle-aged man wearing a suit and tie, and he had
been shot in the back of the neck. Identification had not
been difficult because the man had only one eye and had
once served in the Israeli army, which still held his medi-
cal records. His name was Levi Kroll and he was known
to be an active member, indeed one of the founding part-
ners, of Scorpia. As soon as that connection had been
made, the red lights had begun to flash and the file had
been passed here, to Special Operations.
It seemed almost incredible that such a senior member
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of Scorpia would have been murdered and, even more so,
that his body would have been allowed to be found. It
raised all sorts of questions. What was Kroll doing in
London to begin with? Was it in some way connected to
the appearance of Zeljan Kurst, just a few months before,
and the violence at the British Museum? There were no
records of Kroll having entered the country, although that
was hardly surprising, as he would have had at least a
dozen different identities, each one with its own passport.
Who had killed him? According to the reports, he had
taken a .300 Winchester Short Magnum bullet in the
back of the neck, possibly fired by a Belgian FN Special
Police Rifle from a distance of around seventy yards.
Could a rival organization have declared war on Scorpia?
Blunt considered the possibility. There was no doubt that
Scorpia’s reputation had declined in the past twelve
months. Another group could well have decided to steal
its territory.
There were several clues mentioned in the report.
Blunt had underlined them in red ink, putting a star be-
side them in the margin. To begin with, the MI6 investi-
gators had suggested that Kroll might have been in Egypt.
The shirt that he had been wearing when he died had
been purchased at a shop in the Arkadia Mall, overlook-
ing the Nile. It was made by Dalydress, an expensive
Egyptian manufacturer, and it was part of their new
spring collection, so it must have been bought recently.
Of course, the shirt could have been a present, but they
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had trawled through hundreds of hours of closed-circuit
television footage from all four of London’s airports, con-
centrating on flights that had come in from Egypt, and
finally the work had paid off. A man with a beard and an
eye patch had indeed come off a British Midlands flight
from Cairo the day before Kroll had been washed up.
He had been carrying two items that gave the MI6
men plenty to play with. The first of these was a crocodile-
skin wallet in his inner pocket, purchased from Cartier in
Paris and fairly new. It contained several credit cards in
the name of Goodman, which must have been the identity
he had chosen for this visit to England. The cards had
been checked for their credit history. Only one purchase
had been made. “Goodman” had bought three magazines
and a newspaper at Heathrow Airport. The newspaper
was the Times Educational Supplement—normally read by
teachers and academics. Blunt had drawn a line beside this
and added a question mark.
The wallet also contained a magnetic key card such as
might be used in any hotel in the world, but it was un-
marked and, Blunt knew, very hard to trace. Kroll had
been carrying $350 in different currencies: English
pounds, American dollars, and Egyptian pounds, another
connection with Cairo. Finally, the wallet held the stub of
a ticket to the Milan opera house dated from one month
ago, a receipt for dinner at Harry’s Bar in Venice, and a
photograph of a ten-year-old boy with his arm around a
Rottweiler dog. His son? It wasn’t even known if Kroll
was married.
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But of even greater interest was the Apple iPhone that
had been found in the same pocket as the wallet. Of
course, the water had almost completely destroyed it, but
even so, the MI6 technicians had managed to retrieve a
few tiny scraps of information from its memory. These
had been printed on a separate sheet for Blunt and he laid
it out in front of him.
. . . progress . . . the vicar
Shafik (43) . . . payment
31st May—4th Ju
. . . target . . .
Blunt examined the words, searching for any possible
associations. Assuming this referred to a Scorpia opera-
tion, Kroll would have been unusually careless to enter
anything into his mobile phone. But then of course he
wouldn’t have known he was about to die. The dates,
three weeks from now, rang a faint bell—although were
they referring to June or July? Shafik was an Arabic
name; 43 might be his age. Was he the target mentioned
in the last line? Or could he be an assassin? That would
certainly explain the need for payment. And what of the
vicar? The word sat at the top of the page, underlined.
That would suggest some sort of operation involving re-
ligion, but frankly, church was the last place you would
expect to find anyone from Scorpia.
It was a puzzle, but Blunt didn’t need to waste any
more mental energy trying to decipher it. Half a dozen
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different departments within Special Operations would
have been working on the note from the moment it had
been found, and he had called a meeting for nine o’clock
in the morning, expecting to hear results. As if on cue,
there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Jones entered,
followed by a younger woman, casually dressed, with fair
hair and freckles. This was Samantha Redwing. She was
only twenty-seven, but she had risen quickly through the
ranks of MI6 to become chief science officer. Redwing
had a photographic memory and the analytical skills of a
world-class chess player. Surprisingly, she was also very
normal, with a friend who worked in advertising, an
apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and a proper social life.
Blunt thought she might well be unique.
The two women sat down. They were each carrying
their copy of the Scorpia file. Blunt nodded at them.
“Good morning. What progress do we have on this busi
ness with Levi Kroll?”
“We’ve made some headway.” Mrs. Jones opened her
file. She was dressed, as always, in dark colors, which
with her jet-black hair and dark eyes made her look not
just businesslike but almost as if she were on her way to
a funeral. The next head of MI6? Blunt noticed a sheaf of
pages stapled behind the original report. She had, of
course, come prepared. “First of all, Kroll had been in the
water for around ten hours when he was found, suggest-
ing that he was shot around eleven o’clock at night. We’ve
examined the tidal reports for the Thames, and if he was
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going to end up being washed ashore at Southwark, then
he would have had to have entered the water farther east,
probably somewhere around Woolwich.”
That was close to City Airport. A question formed
in Blunt’s mind, but he didn’t interrupt as his deputy
considered.
“We’ve been focusing our efforts on the electronic key
card and the information we were able to retrieve from
his iPhone,” Mrs. Jones went on. “It’s a shame that all his
telephone numbers were lost—and the phone itself won’t
tell us very much. It’s the latest model, the iPhone 4,
purchased in New York the day it came out.
“But we think we may have decoded the actual words.
They don’t mean very much on their own, but you have
to put them together with the other things that Kroll was
carrying. The key to it all is the Times Educational Sup-
plement that he bought at Heathrow. I have this week’s
edition here.” She produced a copy and laid it on the
desk. “What would a man like Kroll want with a paper
like this? Was he interested in something that might in-
volve a school? If we assume that Ju means June, not
July, then the dates—the thirty-first of May to the fourth
of June—just happen to coincide with the next half-term
in many schools in the UK and around Europe. We know
that Kroll had just come from Cairo. And Shafik—the
name on the phone—could well be Egyptian.”
“So Scorpia might be interested in a school some
where in Egypt.”
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“That’s exactly the conclusion we arrived at and that’s
how we’ve been directing our research.”
Mrs. Jones unwrapped a peppermint and slipped it
into her mouth. Blunt waited for her to continue.
“There are twenty-eight men and women with the
surname Shafik working in different schools around
Egypt,” she said. “Eleven of them are in Cairo. To start
with, we assumed that the figure—forty-three—referred
to their age. That narrowed the field to three and only one
in Cairo, a Mrs. Alifa Shafik, the headmistress at a pri
mary school. But we checked her out and there’s nothing
that could possibly make her of interest to an organiza-
tion like Scorpia. The school is in a poor area of the city.
We decided that trail went nowhere.”
Blunt nodded his agreement. He was quietly im-
pressed. Mrs. Jones had moved quickly and there was no
doubting the logic of what she had said. “Shafik is a fairly
common name,” he muttered. “The link with the educa-
tional supplement is interesting and it may well be that a
school is involved. But it could be in Alexandria or Port
Said or even Luxor. Do we have anything more specific?”
“As a matter of fact we do.” Mrs. Jones flicked through
the pages of the newspaper. “We read the Times Edu-
cational Supplement from cover to cover, looking for
stories that related to Egypt, trying to make a connec-
tion. There were none—but in the back there was an ad-
vertisement for a new head of security at the Cairo
International College of Arts and Education, which is in
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Sheikh Fayed City in the outskirts of Cairo. That seemed
like quite a coincidence, so we contacted the school. And
we discovered something rather interesting. They need a
new security chief because their last one was run over
and killed as he was arriving for work. His name, as it
happens, was Mohammed Shafik. The driver didn’t stop.
The accident—if it was an accident—took place two
months ago on the fourth of March.”
Blunt stared at the page. “The fourth of the third,” he
muttered. “Four three. It’s the same numbers.”
“Exactly.”
“So we can assume that’s why Zeljan Kurst was in
London,” Blunt murmured. “If this school is recruiting a
new security man . . . Scorpia could be trying to get
someone inside.” Blunt quickly read the advertisement in
the Times Educational Supplement. A recruitment office in
London was handling the appointment, but it was no-
where near Woolwich, the place where Kroll might have
been killed. “Has this agency recruited anyone to take
Mr. Shafik’s place?” he asked.
“Yes. They have. The new man is named Erik Gunter.
Scottish mother, German father. He was brought up in
Glasgow and spent time with the First Batallion Scots
Guards before he was wounded in Afghanistan. He re-
ceived the Queen’s Medal for courage. I have his file here.”
She passed it across. Blunt scanned it briefly. Gunter
had come under fire while he was on patrol in Helmund
Province. According to the report, he had almost cer-
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tainly saved the lives of his entire platoon, but he had
taken four bullets himself and had been invalided home.
“What about this business with the vicar?” Blunt
asked. “Does the school have a chaplain?”
“No.” Mrs. Jones glanced at the science officer, who
had been sitting silently through all this. “The reference
to the vicar wasted a great deal of time,” she said. “It
didn’t seem to be at all relevant. At first, we assumed it
must be a code name. You’ll remember that some years
ago we dealt with an assassin who was known only as ‘the
Priest.’ But in the end, Redwing worked it out.”
“It’s a mistake,” Redwing explained. “If you take the
initial letters of the Cairo International College of Arts
and Education—CICAE—and type them into an Apple
iPhone, the machine auto-corrects them and you get the
word
vicar
.”
“It’s the final confirmation,” Mrs. Jones added. “Scor
pia’s operation has to involve this school. But just to
make sure, I checked out the electronic key. I sent Craw-
ley out to Cairo and he reported back this morning. The
school is guarded, fenced in, and monitored twenty-four
hours a day. But there’s been a security leak. The key
opens a door into the kitchen.”
Blunt sat in silence. Outside, an ambulance raced along
Liverpool Street, the scream of its siren hanging in the air.
And what would it find at the end of its journey? Another
life or another death? “Tell me about the school,” he said.
Mrs. Jones was ready for this. She wouldn’t have come
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to Blunt’s office without being fully briefed. “The CICAE
makes an interesting Scorpia target,” she said. Target.
That was the other word that had been retrieved from the
phone. “The school maintains a very large security staff—
and with good reason. It has about four hundred children
from countries all over the world, and if you look down
the names, it’s like a who’s who of the rich and famous.
They’ve got parents who are oil millionaires, politicians,
diplomats, sheikhs, princes, and even pop stars. The Syr-
ian president has a son there. The British ambassador has
a daughter. The chairman of Texas Oil—one of the big-
gest oil companies in America—has no fewer than three
children at the CICAE. Can you imagine if one of them
was kidnapped—or worse still, killed? Suppose Scorpia
was planning to take over the whole school? They could
threaten hundreds of the most powerful parents on the
planet. They’d have enough leverage to start a world war.”
“We can’t be sure that’s what they’re intending,” Blunt
said. For a brief moment, something entirely different
flickered across his consciousness. Seventeen years as
head of MI6 Special Operations had turned his brain into
a computer that never stopped functioning. Always there
were connections, connections . . . What was it? Oh yes.
A report that had crossed his desk a week before. The
death of that boy in Gibraltar. Julius Grief. All this talk of
schoolchildren had reminded him. He considered it for a
moment, then moved on. The boy had tried to escape in
a car and driven over a cliff. The body still hadn’t been
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recovered, but there was no way he could have survived.
So that was that. It couldn’t be related.
“Why else would they target a school?” Mrs. Jones
asked.
“Let’s consider the possibilities.” Blunt thought for a
moment. The eyes behind the square-framed glasses were
bleak. He was weeks away from retirement. He hadn’t
expected this. “Scorpia is planning an assault of some
sort on an international school in Cairo. They send Levi
Kroll to London for reasons that are unclear but that
seem to be connected to the recruitment of this new head
of security. It may well be that Kurst was in London last
February for exactly the same purpose . . .
“It would seem likely that they’re planning to put their
own man inside the school, although looking at his file,
this man Gunter seems to be beyond reproach. He’s a
war hero, for heaven’s sake! However, I agree with you.
It seems a bit of a coincidence that the last head of secu-
rity should have been taken out by a hit-and-run driver.
So . . . let’s assume that Kroll was killed by a rival orga-
nization, because if it had been his own people, they’d
have made sure he had nothing in his pockets when he
was found. In fact, the body wouldn’t have been found at
all. It seems to me there are two questions we have to
consider. Is this the most likely explanation of what has
occurred? And what should we do?”
“We could warn the school,” Mrs. Jones suggested.
“I’m not so sure. Warn them about what? We can only
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guess what Scorpia is planning and we have no idea when
it’s going to happen. We could talk to the Egyptian gov-
ernment, but they’re unlikely to listen to us—besides
which, we have to consider the bigger picture. What
about the Syrians, the Americans, and all the other fami-
lies? If we tell them about this, we’ll have half the intel-
ligence agencies in the world at each other’s throats. It
could all turn into a complete mess.”
“But if Scorpia knew we were onto them, they might
decide not to proceed.”
“Exactly.”
Mrs. Jones saw the glint in Blunt’s eye and suddenly
she understood. “You want them to go ahead,” she said.
“I want them to try,” Blunt agreed. “We could turn
this whole thing into a trap. Just for once, we’re one step
ahead of them, and if they actually decide to make a
move, this could be an opportunity to finish them, once
and for all.”
“But you wouldn’t seriously risk the lives of the chil
dren at this international school?”
“Of course not. We’ll put an agent inside to keep an
eye on the situation, and the moment Scorpia shows
themselves, we’ll be ready for them.” Blunt thought for a
moment. “What we need—,” he began.
“No.” It was unheard of for Mrs. Jones to interrupt
her superior when he was speaking. But she did so now.
“We can’t do it.”
Blunt blinked slowly. “You know what I’m thinking.”
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Of course she did. Mrs. Jones had spent hundreds of
hours with Blunt. Soon she might replace him. She knew
him inside out. “We can’t use Alex,” she said.
“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Jones. But you must
admit that this would have been exactly the sort of mis-
sion for him. Put a fourteen-year-old into a school and
nobody would look twice. Just like at Point Blanc.”
“Alex is fifteen now,” Mrs. Jones reminded him. “And
that business in Kenya was the end of it, Alan.” She didn’t
often use his Christian name when there were other peo-
ple in the room, but for now she ignored Redwing, who
had lapsed back into silence, waiting her turn. “He was
badly hurt . . . burned. He was in the hospital again. We
both agreed. He’s been through enough.”
“I’m not sure I agreed.”
“We also have orders from Downing Street.” Mrs.
Jones didn’t dare disobey an instruction that came di
rectly from the prime minister, not when she might be
weeks away from taking over at MI6.
Blunt understood that. “I still suggest we put one of
our people inside,” he said.
Mrs. Jones relaxed. “As a teacher?”
“A teacher or a cleaner. Get Crawley onto it. Smithers
to provide surveillance and communications equipment.
In the meantime, let’s keep an eye on all known Scorpia
agents, particularly if they show up anywhere near the
Egyptian border.” He turned to Redwing, as if noticing
her for the first time. “Your thoughts, Redwing?”
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“I just have a couple of things to add, sir,” Redwing
said. “I have no argument with anything that Mrs. Jones
has said, but it does seem a little odd that Kroll would
have flown into Heathrow Airport and then traveled all
the way across London to Woolwich, if that really was
where he was killed. Why didn’t he just fly into City Air-
port? It would have been much closer.”
Blunt was pleased. It was exactly the same thought
that had already occurred to him. “There are no direct
flights from Cairo,” he said. “But for that matter, why
didn’t he use a private jet?”
“What really puzzles me is the medical report. First of
all, from the contents of the dead man’s stomach, we
know that the last meal he ate included snails, roast pork,
potatoes, and some sort of dessert made with Grand
Marnier. It’s the sort of meal you might eat in Paris or
London, but it’s not exactly what you’d expect from a
man who’d just flown in from Cairo.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, even in first class, he wouldn’t have been served
snails on the plane. And pork is not a choice in a Muslim
country. For that matter we found no Egyptian spices or
herbs of any sort. No rice or falafel. Of course, he could
have been staying in an international hotel. He may hate
Egyptian food. But it still feels strange.”
“And there’s something else?”
“Yes, sir. When we examined the body, we found a
tiny fragment of glass buried in the back of the neck. It
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had been driven in by the impact of the bullet.” Redwing
paused. “It’s certainly possible that Kroll was shot in
London, somewhere close to the River Thames. He could
have been standing on one of the banks or perhaps on a
bridge. He was shot and fell into the water.
“But the fragment of glass tells another story. He was
inside, on the other side of a window. In which case the
body was then taken and dumped in the river. But if that
was what happened, what was the point? Is it possible
that the body was meant to be found?”
“And you’re suggesting that the note was planted?”
Blunt considered. “But why would Scorpia want us to
know what they were doing?”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me, sir,” Redwing
admitted.
There was a long silence. Blunt made his decision.
“We’ll go ahead and put someone in the school,” he
said. “It may be a complete waste of time, but I can’t see
that it will do any harm. Still, it’s a shame to waste the
resources of an active agent.”
Mrs. Jones glanced at him. Once again, she saw what
was going through his mind. Alex Rider would already be
on his way to Cairo if Blunt had his way.
But it wasn’t going to happen. Alex Rider was history.
Mrs. Jones had never said as much to him, but she had
promised it to herself, and no matter what her own future
was within MI6, it was one promise she was determined
not to break.
P ART T W O
A L E X
7
A N G L E OF
A T T A C K
“A LEX! YOU’VE OVERSLEPT AGAIN. Get yourself out of
bed!”
Jack Starbright was standing in the doorway of Alex’s
bedroom on the first floor of the house they shared near
the King’s Road in Chelsea. It was seven forty-five in the
morning and he should have been up and getting dressed,
but all she could see was the back of his head with a
clump of messy light brown hair poking out from under-
neath the duvet and the curve of his body beneath.
“Alex . . . ,” she said again.
A hand appeared, clutched hold of the pillow, and
dragged it down. “What day is it, Jack?” The voice came
from nowhere, muffled beneath the bedclothes.
“It’s Friday. It’s a school day.”
“I don’t want to go to school.”
“Yes, you do.”
“What’s for breakfast?”
“You’ll find out when you’ve had your shower.”
Jack closed the bedroom door and a few seconds later
Alex emerged from bed, wrinkling his eyes against the
morning light. He threw back the covers and rolled into
a sitting position, looking around the wreck that was his
room. There were crumpled clothes on the floor, school
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books and folders everywhere, DVDs and games stacked
up beside his computer, posters peeling off the walls. He
and Jack had actually had one of their very rare argu-
to tidy the room. That wasn’t the problem. In fact, it was
the other way around. He had insisted that she stop tidy-
ing it for him—as she had done every day for the last
eight years. In the end she had understood. This was his
space. And this was the way he wanted it.
He stripped off his pajamas and stumbled into the
shower. The blast of hot water woke him up instantly and
he stood there, letting it pound onto his shoulders and
back. This was his favorite part of the morning, five min-
utes when he didn’t belong to anyone—not to Jack and
not to Brookland School—when he could collect his
thoughts and prepare himself for whatever the day might
throw his way.
He wasn’t a spy anymore. That was the important
thing. That was what he had to remind himself. Four
months had passed without so much as a whisper from
MI6. He had made it through the second half of the
spring term and the first five weeks of the summer with
out being recruited, kidnapped, or forced into some hare-
brained mission on the other side of the world. He was
getting used to the fact that it was never going to happen
again. He was tall now, five foot ten. His shoulders had
broadened and he had virtually lost the little-boy looks
that had been so useful to Alan Blunt and Mrs. Jones. His
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hair was longer. He was fifteen years old. There had been
times when he had thought it was a birthday he would
never see.
And what had happened in those four months?
School, of course. Alex had even begun to think about
college . . . It would be only three years away. He already
knew that science and math were his strong suits. His
physics teacher, Mrs. Morant, insisted that he had a nat-
ural talent. “I can see you at Oxford or Cambridge, Alex.
If you just apply yourself and try to turn up for school a
little more often.” Then there were sports. Alex had been
chosen as the captain of the first team at soccer. And
drama—he was playing Teen Angel in the summer pro-
duction of Grease, although he still wasn’t convinced he
could actually sing.
He seemed to be at home less and less, hanging out
on the King’s Road with Tom Harris and James Hale,
who were still his two best friends. He played soccer on
weekends and had joined a rowing club near Hammer-
smith. He was in the fifteen-to-twenty-one group, and he
loved the rhythm of it, slicing through the water on a
Saturday afternoon, down through Putney and Rich-
mond and on to Hampton Court, even if his muscles
ached for the rest of the weekend. The cox, barking out
instructions with an old-fashioned bullhorn, was a girl of
his own age, Rowan Gently, and He had joked that her
name sounded like their progress up the Thames.
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But he was still seeing Sabina—even if most of their
contact was made through Facebook. It wasn’t easy being
thousands of miles apart with an eight-hour time differ-
ence so that while Alex was getting up and frantically
grabbing his clothes, she was still sound asleep. It was
almost as if they were on different planets, and part of
him knew that if she didn’t return to England soon, it
would be almost impossible to maintain their friendship.
He had seen her quite recently. Her parents had in-
vited him out for ten days during the holidays, and Jack
had stumped up the cost of the transatlantic flight.
It had given her a chance to have a break too.
It had been a fantastic vacation . . . something the two
of them had promised themselves after their near-death
encounter with Desmond McCain in Scotland at the start
of the year. They had explored San Francisco—the Golden
Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz prison—and
driven down the winding coastal road to Big Sur, where
they had spent the weekend hiking and camping in some
of the most stunning countryside in California.
As he pulled on his trousers and set about trying to
find two matching socks, Alex remembered the last night
he had spent with Sabina. The two of them had sat to-
gether on the porch of the white-painted wooden house
that Edward Pleasure had rented in Pacific Heights, a
quiet, leafy part of the city. It was a brilliant night, the sky
deep black and scattered with stars.
“I wish you didn’t have to go back.”
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“Me too,” Alex said.
“It’s crazy. You’re my closest friend and you’re thou
sands of miles away.”
“When do you think you’ll come back to England?”
Sabina sighed. “I’m not sure we ever will. Dad’s doing
well out here and he’s got his green card now, which
means he can live here permanently. And Mum likes it.”
“Do you think we’ll stay together, Alex?”
“I don’t know.” There didn’t seem any point in lying.
“You’ll probably meet some American football player and
I’ll never hear from you again.”
“You know that’s not true.” Sabina paused. “Maybe
you can come back in the summer. You know you’re al
ways welcome. We could go to Yellowstone. Or maybe to
LA . . .”
“I’d like that.”
Alex remembered how Sabina had looked at him then.
Alex grabbed a shirt, but before he put it on, he turned
around and examined his shoulders in the mirror. It was
something he did automatically, every day. The burns
had faded, but they were still there like a series of excla-
mation marks, the scars from the burning aviation fuel
that had rained down on him in the airfield in Laikipia,
Kenya. The doctors had told him they would probably
stay with him for life. Well, he could add them to the mu-
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seum of injuries that his body had become. The bullet
wound in his chest, the various bruises, the thin white line
that had been seared across the back of his hand by, of all
things, a poisonous spider’s web.
Did he miss it? Did he mind being an ordinary school-
boy once again? Alex felt he had passed through a tunnel.
There had been a brief time when he had needed the dan-
ger, when he was almost glad to be part of the secret
world of MI6. After all, that was what he had been trained
for virtually all his life. His father had been a spy. His
uncle, Ian Rider, had been a spy. Between the two of
them, they had made sure he would follow in what had
become a family tradition.
But now he was out in the light. Enough time had
passed since Kenya to remind him that real life was bet-
ter. Herod Sayle, Dr. Grief, Mrs. Rothman, Major Sarov,
Damian Cray, Winston Yu, and most recently, Desmond
McCain. He had come up against them and they were all
dead. It was time now to leave them behind.
He glanced at his watch. Despite Jack’s wake-up call,
he was going to be late for school—and this in the week
when the principal, Mr. Lee, had announced double de-
tention for latecomers, part of Brookland’s annual crack-
down on personal discipline. One term it had been
crooked ties and shirts out of pants. The next it had been
chewing gum. Now it was timekeeping. It was good to
have such little things to worry about. Alex buttoned up
his shirt and looped his tie over his head. Then he hurried
down to the kitchen for breakfast.
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There were two soft-boiled eggs waiting for him on
the table. Alex was amused to see that Jack still insisted
on cutting his toast into Marmite soldiers. She was mak-
ing coffee for herself and tea for him, and as he took his
place, she brought the two cups over.
“Alex—you look a complete mess. Your tie’s crooked,
you haven’t brushed your hair, and that shirt’s crumpled.”
“It’s only school, Jack.”
“If I ran the school, I wouldn’t let you in.”
She set the two cups on the table and sat down her-
self, watching fondly as Alex sliced off the tops of his eggs
and dipped the first soldier in. “Have you got any plans
this weekend?” she asked. “I thought maybe after you
finished rowing, we could take off somewhere . . . get out
of London.”
“Actually, I’m away this weekend.” Alex had forgotten
to tell her.
“Where?”
“Tom’s invited me over. His brother’s coming over
from Italy and we thought we’d get together.” Tom Har-
ris was as much of a mess as ever, living with his mother
after his father had walked out. Alex had met his brother,
Jerry, when he’d first gone chasing after Scorpia, in
Rome. Tom and Jerry. As Tom often said, the names told
you everything you needed to know about their parents.
“Okay. That’s fine. I’ll put out a toothbrush and a
spare set of clothes.”
Was there something in Jack’s voice? Alex glanced in
her direction, but she seemed okay. She looked the way
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she always did—relaxed and a bit ramshackle, dressed in
a T-shirt, jeans, and a loose-fitting cardigan. She was sit-
ting with her elbows on the table, cradling her coffee cup
and smiling. But just for a moment she hadn’t quite
sounded like herself. It was as if she had something on
her mind.
“Is something the matter?” Alex asked.
“No!” She pulled herself together. “No. I’m sorry. I
just stayed up a little too late last night and I’m a bit
tired.”
That would make sense. Jack had recently started
teaching herself Italian. Alex wasn’t quite sure why, al
though one of the reasons might have been the Italian
teacher who was twenty-nine, dark, and built like a boxer.
She was certainly taking it seriously with private lessons
twice a week and tapes every night.
“You’re not worrying about me, are you? I haven’t
heard a thing from MI6.”
“I know,” Jack said. “It’s not that.” She shook her
head. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
Ten minutes later, Alex was on his way, cycling to
school on the new Raleigh Pioneer 160 that he’d bought
to replace his old Condor Roadracer. It wouldn’t have
been his first choice, but he’d managed to get a deal from
the supplier and it was perfect for getting around London,
not too flashy, not likely to get stolen. And after he’d
changed the seat to an ergonomically designed Rido R2,
it was comfortable enough too. Glancing around, he saw
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Jack standing at the door, waving him good-bye. That was
strange too. Normally, she wouldn’t have left the kitchen.
But it was a beautiful spring day. The sun was shin-
ing. Alex forgot about her as he accelerated toward the
King’s Road. A moment later he had turned the corner
and he was gone.
Jack closed the door.
She was annoyed with herself. She still hadn’t talked
to Alex about the letter she had received a week ago. It
was typical of her mother to put it all down with pen and
paper rather than to telephone or send an e-mail. Her
parents weren’t that old, only in their sixties, but they had
always been purposefully old-fashioned—as if they were
determined to show that their world was better than the
one that was taking shape all around them.
And now her father was ill. He’d had a stroke at the
start of the spring and he needed someone to look after
him. Jack’s mother did what she could. Jack had an older
sister, but she was living in Florida with three young chil-
dren of her own. Jack had now been in England for com-
ing up to ten years and her mother was suggesting, very
gently, that she ought to think about coming home.
And in her heart, Jack knew that she was right. Maybe
it was time to go.
It wasn’t just because of her father. She had her own
future to think about. Here she was in London, almost
thirty and single. She had first come to England as a stu-
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dent with a place at St. Martin’s School of Art, planning
to become a jewelry designer. She had started working
for Ian Rider to pay the fees and somehow she had al-
lowed herself to get sucked into his world. In the early
days, she would live at the Chelsea house when Ian Rider
was abroad, taking Alex to school, then slipping away to
do her studies until it was time to pick him up. But Ian
had been away more and more often until it had made
sense to move in permanently. Suddenly, without ever
really choosing it, she had become part of the family, al-
most a big sister for Alex. She had adored him from the
start, even when he was seven years old. And she felt
sorry for him too. She had been told that both his parents
had died in a plane crash, and she could see that Ian
Rider was no substitute, not when he traveled so much.
And then Ian Rider had died and everything had
changed.
Had she ever wondered about her employer? He had
told her he worked in international banking and she had
taken his word for it, but looking back, she knew that she
had been foolish. No international banker kept three dif-
ferent passports in his desk drawer. Jack had come upon
them once, looking for a pair of scissors, and she had
asked him about them. It was the only time Ian Rider had
ever been angry with her.
“Never ask me about my work, Jack. It’s the one thing
I’ll never talk about. Not with you. Not with Alex . . .”
She could hear his voice now and wondered how she
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could have been so stupid. No international bankers
stayed away for weeks at a time—and certainly none of
them returned with so many inexplicable injuries. Ian had
been mugged in Rome, involved in a car crash in Geneva,
and broken his arm skiing in Vancouver. He had joked
about it, saying he was accident prone . . . until, that is,
the final accident had revealed the truth.
What Alex didn’t know, what Jack had never told him,
was that she had actually decided to leave two weeks be-
fore Ian Rider had set off for Cornwall on the mission
that had killed him. She had even gone as far as typing
out her resignation letter. She had felt dreadful—but
thinking about it, she was sure she was doing the right
thing. She wasn’t going to be a nanny and a housekeeper
forever, and the longer she stayed, the harder it would
finally be to break the bonds with Alex. She would still be
his friend, visiting whenever she could. But it was defi
nitely time to move on.
And then the news had come of Ian’s death, the fu
neral, the first meeting with Alan Blunt, and the almost
incredible truth that Ian had been a spy, working for MI6
all along. That was when Alex had been recruited. And
what had persuaded Alex to risk his life that first time, in-
vestigating the Stormbreaker computer? He hadn’t done
it for his country. He hadn’t done it out of respect for his
uncle. No—MI6 had threatened to expel Jack from the
country, and he had agreed to help them in return for a
permanent visa so that she could stay.
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How could she abandon him after that? As far as Jack
knew, Alex had no living relatives. She had tried to find
some trace of his grandparents, but it seemed that all four
of them had died young. There were no uncles or aunts.
The closest relative she’d been able to dig up was a cousin
living in Glossop, and she couldn’t quite imagine Alex
starting a new life there. And so she had stayed. She was
almost the only person in the world who knew his secret.
So long as he was involved with MI6, nobody could take
her place.
All that seemed to be behind them now. The last time
she had seen Mrs. Jones, it had been a few days before
Alex’s fifteenth birthday at St. Dominic’s Hospital in
north London. Alex had just gotten back from Kenya—
badly hurt—and that was when she had finally put her
foot down and insisted that there would be no further
missions, that from now on MI6 would leave him alone.
Mrs. Jones had made no promises, but Jack had sensed
that maybe she had won the argument. Certainly, she had
heard nothing since.
In truth, Alex was probably too old for them now. He
didn’t look like a child anymore. Jack remembered how he
had once crawled up a chimney when he was training with
the SAS. He wouldn’t be able to manage that again. There
were probably SAS men who were smaller than him now.
But if Jack was relieved that this part of their lives was
behind them, there was one side effect that she hadn’t
foreseen. Alex didn’t need her so much now. That was
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what it all boiled down to. He wasn’t going to come home
wounded with burns or bullet holes. There was no need
to protect him. And the two of them were growing apart.
Recently Alex had begun spending more and more time
without her, with his friends. Take this weekend, for ex-
ample. He’d casually mentioned that he was taking off
with Tom Harris and hadn’t even stopped to consider
that he would be leaving her on her own. It was the same
last spring when he’d been away for two weeks with Sa-
bina. Jack didn’t mind. It was how it should be. He was a
teenager. But she didn’t feel wanted. And that told her
that—at last—it was time to move on.
All she had to do was tell Alex. She would leave at the
end of the summer vacation and together they would find
someone to take her place. Of course, he’d be sad. He’d
probably argue with her, but in the end, he’d see it her
way. Jack got up and set about clearing the breakfast
things. She had put it off too many times already, but her
mind was set. She would talk to him when he got home
tonight.
“Okay. We’re going to start with a warm-up.” Grant
Donovan, head of math at Brookland School, pressed a
button and six geometric shapes appeared on the white-
board. Each one had an angle marked x. “In three of these
diagrams, x equals forty-five degrees,” he explained.
You’ve got five minutes to tell me which, and the first
person to finish gets this week’s bonus prize.”
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“I hope it’s better than last week’s bonus prize,”
someone called out.
“The last one of you to finish gets a page of negative
multiplications to take home.”
There was a general groan and everyone put their
heads down.
Alex tried to concentrate on the shapes, but they were
just floating in front of him, refusing to come into focus.
All the triangles looked the same to him, like one of those
puzzles in a “spot the difference” magazine. It had been
the same in English Lit an hour before, trying to make
sense of a passage from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “If
music be the food of love . . .” Or was it “the love of food,”
and what did it mean, anyway? He was finding it hard to
think. He could see the words on the page, but they
refused to come together to make sentences.
He put his pen down and ignored the triangles. There
was something on his mind, and he wouldn’t be able to
do anything until he had worked out what it was. He
played back the events of the day. He had gotten out of
bed as usual, showered, and dressed. He’d actually fin
ished his homework the night before—nothing to worry
about there. He knew his lines for the school play. No
money worries. He still had plenty left from his weekly
allowance.
Then down to breakfast. He replayed the conversation
with Jack and in particular the moment he had told her
he would be away for the weekend. That was it. She’d
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been upset. He’d actually challenged her about it, and
although she’d denied it, he could tell from her voice . . .
Now that he thought about it, Alex realized that the
two of them had been spending less time together re-
cently. What with homework, the school play, the rowing,
and all the rest of it, there were days when they hardly
spoke at all. Suddenly he was ashamed of himself. Jack
had always been there for him. She was always looking
after him. But he’d given her the impression that she
didn’t matter to him at all.
He glanced out the window. There was a building site
across the road, a new block of apartments going up op-
posite the school. Everyone was already joking about who
exactly would want to live with a view of seven hundred
teenagers—not to mention the noise at half past eight in
the morning and a quarter to four every afternoon. The
site was empty today. The builders seemed to come in
more or less when they felt like it, but Alex noticed a
single man making his way across the roof in a crouching
run with a bag slung across his shoulder.
What to do about Jack? Alex made a resolution. He
would talk to her tonight. He would tell her that he would
be lost without her and that he needed her as much as he
always had. Of course she knew all this, but it was still
worth saying. And he didn’t have to spend the whole
weekend with Tom. Maybe he could come back on Sun-
day afternoon and the two of them could go over to Bor-
ough Market or something. The thought made Alex feel
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more comfortable, and he turned his attention back to the
first of the triangles. ABC was a right angle . . . ninety
degrees. The other two angles couldn’t possibly be the
same, so no forty-five degrees here. Cross that one out
and move on to the next.
Three desks away, a lean ginger-haired boy named
Spencer was aiming a missile at someone in the front
row. He was balancing a piece of eraser on a plastic ruler
that he was bending back. He released the ruler, catapult-
ing the eraser across the room. It missed the boy in the
front row and bounced off the wall. Someone sniggered.
Mr. Donovan had seen him. “If you want to stay in the
top group, Spencer, try not to behave like a fifth-grader.
Okay?” He sounded more tired than annoyed.
“Yes, sir.”
“Two more minutes. You should have cracked half of
them by now.”
Alex was nowhere near. He was suddenly aware that
he wasn’t feeling very well. It wasn’t particularly hot in the
classroom, but he was sweating. The skin on his forehead
and the back of his neck was damp, as if he had caught a
fever. There was a pounding in his head and he was al-
most finding it difficult to breathe. What was wrong with
him? It was eleven o’clock in the morning. He hadn’t had
lunch yet, so for once the cafeteria couldn’t be blamed.
He felt a pain in his chest and realized that his old wound
was throbbing like some sort of biological alarm clock
that had just gone off. As if it was reminding him . . .
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Or warning him.
The man on the roof. Suddenly Alex was back on Liv-
erpool Street, stepping out of the offices of MI6 seconds
before a sniper had opened fire with a bullet that had
knocked him to the ground, almost killing him. What had
he seen—out of the corner of his eye? No. It was impos-
sible. It couldn’t be happening again. Not here. Very
slowly, forcing himself not to give anything away, Alex
turned his head. He was just a bored schoolboy looking
out the window, he told himself. If there really was some-
one there, if they were focusing on him even now, he
mustn’t give them an excuse to fire.
Because the man was a sniper. He had no doubt of it.
Why else would he be running with his head down and
his shoulders hunched unless he was trying not to be no-
ticed? And what sort of builder carries a long, narrow
leather bag across his back? There was no sign of him
now, but Alex visualized the shape and the size of the bag
and knew with the ice-cold grip of certainty exactly what
it must have contained. Not a shovel. Not a drill. Not
anything you might use to construct a block of apart-
ments. Anyway, nobody was working there today. This
man was there for something else.
And he was still up there somewhere, hiding. Alex
looked again, scanning the seemingly empty roof. Yes.
There he was, lying flat on his stomach with his head
pointing this way. He was partly concealed behind a wall
of scaffolding with a plastic sheet hanging in front of him
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like a flimsy window. Alex couldn’t see the gun, but he
could sense it and knew there could be only one target it
was aiming at.
There is a sort of telepathy between the hunter and the
hunted, between the sniper and his target. Alex couldn’t
possibly know when the man was going to fire, but he
jerked back instinctively, and it seemed to him that there
was a faint tinkle and a thud at exactly that same mo-
ment. Right in front of him a gash appeared as if by magic
in the surface of his desk, splinters of wood flying up-
ward. Alex stared at the damage. The enormity of what
had just happened flooded over him. Someone had taken
a shot at him. Someone had tried to kill him. If he had
still been leaning forward over his notepad, the bullet
would have driven into the top of his head.
“Alex . . .?” Mr. Donovan had seen the movement, but
he hadn’t noticed the tiny, round hole in the window.
Even if he had, it would have taken him several more
seconds to put it all together. Snipers do not fire into
school classrooms—certainly not in England. As far as he
could see, Alex had just had some sort of fit. Either that
or he had been stung by a wasp. One or two of the other
boys were looking around curiously. The diagrams on the
whiteboard suddenly seemed a thousand miles away.
“Get down!” Alex didn’t shout, but there could be no
mistaking the urgency in his voice. “Someone’s shooting
at us.”
“What?”
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Alex was already on his feet, backing away from his
desk, moving out of the gunman’s sight line before he
could fire a second shot. He knew that while he was in the
room, he was putting the entire class in danger. Several
of the boys around him had stood up, making themselves
targets. Some of them had noticed the hole in the window
and knew he was telling the truth. Panic was already
sweeping through the room.
“Get down!” This time he shouted the words louder,
but they still just stood there. Of course, this was Alex
Rider. Everyone knew the rumors about him—that he
was involved in things that it was better not to talk about.
But this situation was just too incredible. It couldn’t be
happening.
And then there was a second shot. Tom Harris yelled
and spun around, and to Alex’s horror he saw that his best
friend had been shot in the arm, that his jacket was torn,
and that blood was already seeping through the sleeve.
“Everyone on the floor!” Mr. Donovan had finally
taken command, and his order was followed by the crash
of upturned desks and chairs as twenty-two boys dived
for cover. Tom was the last to react, still in shock, one
hand gripping his wound. Alex glanced at the window,
knowing that he couldn’t offer himself as a target. But if
the man fired again, Tom would be directly in his line of
fire. Alex ran three paces and threw himself at his friend,
rugby-tackling him to the ground. Tom howled with pain.
His face was completely white.
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Bells began to clang all over the school. Alex hadn’t
seen him do it, but he guessed Mr. Donovan must have
hit the fire alarm before taking cover himself. Everyone
was huddling together against the side wall. Alex propped
Tom up, quickly examining his wound. There was blood
everywhere—it was all over Alex’s hands—but he didn’t
think his friend had been too badly hurt. A flesh wound
only. If Tom had been unlucky, the bullet might just have
chipped a bone, but Alex was sure it had gone straight in
and out.
“Nobody move!” Mr. Donovan was shouting. “We’re
safe here. The police and the fire engines will be on their
way.”
Brilliant. The rest of the school would be evacuating
into the yard, making themselves perfect targets for the
man on the roof. Alex thought of warning the math
teacher, trying to explain what had just happened. But
then he realized that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t a case
of a psychopath with a grudge against kids. The man had
come here for him.
And with that thought came a surge of anger so pow-
erful that Alex felt himself almost overwhelmed. He had
given up spying. He hadn’t been near MI6 for months.
He was just a schoolboy trying to get through the day.
But someone thought otherwise. Someone had made the
cold-blooded decision to send a man with a gun to kill
him and to hurt anyone else who happened to get in the
way. Who was it? Was this revenge for something Alex
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had done in the past? Or was this some new enemy with
a plan of his own?
Alex had to know. If the sniper got away today, he
would be free to come back tomorrow or the day after. In
fact, Alex would be in permanent danger. In the space of
a second he had been plunged back into his old life and
he didn’t want to be there. He was furious.
“Alex! What do you think you’re doing?”
Alex was already on his feet. Mr. Donovan stared at
him, still crouching, afraid to move. “Don’t leave, Alex!
You’ve got to stay here!”
But he was too late. Alex had crossed the room and
thrown open the door. A second later he had disappeared
into the corridor, fighting his way past the rest of the
school as they surged down the corridors, following the
well-practiced fire drills that would take them outside.
As he burst into the yard, he was already fumbling for
his keys, heading for the bike shed. The bells were still
ringing. All around him, seven hundred schoolboys were
chattering and laughing, looking out for the smoke while
their teachers tried to shout them into straight lines. Alex
ignored them. He found his bike, unlocked it, and
jumped on.
“Alex?” Miss Bedfordshire, the school secretary, had
seen him. She tried to wave him down. Alex ignored her.
He pushed down and swerved around her and then he
was gone, disappearing through the school gates.
8
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L E S S O N
A SITTING TARGE T.
That was how Alex felt. He was cycling slowly around
the side of the school right next to the building site where
the marksman had been concealed, and he was very
aware that the street was empty with only a few parked
cars, that there were no witnesses, and that if the sniper
was still in place, this time he wouldn’t miss. He could
imagine the crosshairs of the scope sweeping across the
street, settling first on his shoulders, then on the back of
his neck. Perhaps they were already there and one twitch
of a finger would send him catapulting over the handle
bars and into oblivion.
He jerked his head up toward the rooftop but saw
nothing. Alex was gambling on the fact that the man had
already made his getaway. He would have heard the
school alarms go off and would have assumed that Alex
had been evacuated with the rest of his class, that he was
lost in the crowd, one uniform among hundreds. Surely
that was what he would think. And with the police arriv-
ing (Alex could hear them now, the whoop of sirens com-
ing from all four points of the compass, closing in on the
school), he wouldn’t want to hang around.
Where was he? Alex had hoped to spot him as he left.
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But there was nobody in the building site, no sign of any
movement on the roof or the ladders leading down. He
drew to a halt, resting with one foot against the curb,
listening for the sound of an engine. Somewhere, on the
other side of the scaffolding and the half-built walls, there
was someone in a hurry to get out of here. Where are
you? Every police car in the country will be here in a
minute. You don’t want to hang around.
Without warning, a car appeared at the top of the
road, a silver VW Golf, pulling out of the building site and
turning away from where Alex was waiting. He couldn’t
see the driver, but he thought, from the shape, that it was
a man and he seemed to be alone. It had to be the sniper.
Alex pushed off again. Behind him, the alarms were still
ringing at Brookland School. He heard the first police cars
arrive, the thud of slamming doors, and men’s voices
barking out commands. There was no time to lose. Any
minute now the roads would be cordoned off. If he was
really unlucky, the sniper would get away while he was
left behind.
The VW was driving quickly but without breaking the
speed limit, as if not wanting to draw attention to itself.
Alex pedaled harder to catch up—at the same time mak-
ing sure he didn’t get too close. It occurred to him that he
had done this before, almost a year ago. Then it had been
two drug dealers in a Skoda. He had followed them to a
houseboat on the Thames, near Putney Bridge. He’d
never thought he was going to have to repeat the
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exercise . . . and this time it was going to be more diffi
cult. The dealers had had no idea who he was. But one
look in the mirror and the sniper would certainly recog-
nize him. Alex swung his bike off the road and onto the
sidewalk, crouching behind the parked cars to keep out
of sight.
London is the slowest-moving city in Europe. Cars
drive at an average of twelve miles per hour, and it’s well
known that the fastest way to cross the city is on two
wheels. As Alex powered up the sidewalk, he remembered
his uncle, Ian Rider, complaining as he sat in a jam. “I
don’t know why I bother with a BMW six-cylinder turbo-
charged engine. I might as well drive a horse and buggy.”
Alex knew that his bike would have the edge on the VW.
He could weave in and out of the traffic. He could ignore
the lights. He could cut corners across the sidewalk. Pro-
vided they didn’t reach any of the outer motorways, he’d
be able to keep up.
The car reached a T-junction and turned left, heading
toward the King’s Road. Before it disappeared from sight,
Alex memorized its license plate number. The letters
spelled out a word—BEG 88. There were plenty of Volks-
wagens on the London roads and most of them seemed
to be silver. It was helpful that this one should have a
registration that was so easily memorable. Still on the
sidewalk, Alex swung around the corner, narrowly miss-
ing a woman pushing a stroller. The Raleigh 160 was
perfect for this sort of cycling. It wasn’t too heavy and the
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700cc alloy wheels were perfectly balanced, making it
easy to manipulate while its twenty-one gears gave him
all the speed he could ask for. They were heading west,
out of London. The school was already a long way behind.
And then the VW signaled right. Alex looked for the
turnoff but there wasn’t one. They were passing a parade
of shops with an Esso garage at the end. And that was
where the car was heading. Alex swore to himself. He
must have been chasing the wrong man! Snipers pulling
away from their latest target don’t usually stop to fill up
with gas or buy themselves a Twix. Alex stopped for a
second time, catching his breath as the VW rolled across
the forecourt. He thought about cycling back to Brook-
land, then decided against it. There would be too many
questions to answer. It would be easier just to go home
and find Jack.
The car wasn’t filling up. Without stopping, it had
driven straight into the automatic car wash—and that
was strange because there was a large sign reading OUT
OF ORDER. From his vantage point on the other side of the
road, Alex watched in puzzlement. As far as he could see,
the driver hadn’t even opened his window to drop a token
into a slot, and yet as the VW disappeared behind the
plastic screen, the brushes begin to rotate and jets of
water shot out of the hoses running along the walls. It
was as if the car wash had been waiting for the car. The
sign must have been put there to stop any other drivers
getting in ahead.
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Alex stayed where he was, waiting for the VW to
emerge. He was certain now that something strange was
going on and that this was after all connected in some
way with the shooting at his school. He could only make
out the shape of the car. It was lost in the cloud of white
foam that mushroomed against the plastic screen. Water
and soap suds coursed along the concrete floor. The
whole process took four minutes. At last the brush
stopped and returned to its starter position, and a few
seconds later the VW drove out.
Only it was no longer silver. It was now bright red.
Had it been painted inside the car wash? No—exactly the
opposite had happened. The silver paint had been stripped
off to reveal the red beneath and the license plate had
changed too. Parts of the letters had been washed away
so that BEG now read PFC and the number 88 had be-
come 33. This was all part of the plan! The driver had
known that the police would be called. After a school
shooting, every police car in London would be on the
lookout for the getaway vehicle. Well, if they were looking
for a silver VW with the license plate BEG 88, they would
be disappointed. That car had vanished into thin air.
Alex knew now that this wasn’t one man operating on
his own. It would have taken a serious organization to
arrange the trick with the car wash. Scorpia? The triads?
They were both enemies of his, but he somehow doubted
that either of them would come for him now, after months
of inactivity. There would be no point. Even so, he would
have to be careful. The car could be leading him into
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further danger and he was completely on his own. Only
Miss Bedfordshire had seen him leave the school and she
had no idea which direction he’d taken. Only a few hours
ago he’d been congratulating himself that all his troubles
were over. How wrong he had been!
He followed the car down the King’s Road as far as
Eel Brook Common, a small patch of green parkland
crowded with Chelsea residents walking their dogs. The
car was pulling away, traveling at about thirty miles per
hour, but luckily it was forced to stop at a red traffic light
and Alex was able to catch up. He was absolutely deter-
mined. Whatever happened, he wasn’t going to let it get
away. But then the car turned off down Wandsworth
Bridge Road, driving straight down to the Thames. Alex
gritted his teeth and stamped down on the pedals. He
knew that the roads widened on the other side of the
bridge. A bicycle could keep up with a car in the traffic,
but once they were over the river, he’d have no chance.
They stopped again and Alex was tempted to move
closer, to try to get a view in through the side window. It
might help later on if he could give the police a descrip-
tion of the driver. All he could see from here was a
hunched-up figure wearing a cap. He wondered what
sort of man could bring himself to fire into a crowded
school. How much had he been paid? And that made him
think again about the car wash. What sort of minds would
have thought up something like that? What other tricks
might they have up their sleeve?
And suddenly he was on Wandsworth Bridge. Only a
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few weeks ago he had rowed underneath it, and he had
wondered then how it could possibly have been built.
Most of the Thames bridges were very elegant, built as if
to ornament the river. This one was just a slab of rein-
forced concrete—functional and ugly. It was also very
long, with four lanes of traffic, and Alex had to pedal hard
to keep up, afraid of being seen but more afraid of losing
the VW altogether. He glimpsed the dark gray water be-
neath him, stretching into the distance with nothing
memorable on either side. The driver came to a round-
about and accelerated onto it without looking left or
right. Alex did the same and was rewarded with the deaf-
ening blast of a horn and a fistful of hot, dusty air as a
huge truck thundered past, inches away. He wobbled
slightly as he fought for balance, aware that his legs were
getting tired. It would be just as well if the car did speed
off soon. Any farther and he might get himself killed.
But instead it seemed that the VW had reached its
destination. It turned off down a narrow drive that snaked
back toward the river, and as Alex slowed down, he saw
it draw into a parking space and stop. A sign read Wands-
worth Park, but it wasn’t a park so much as an industrial
estate, one of those little pieces of London that had some-
how been overlooked. There were a couple of office
buildings sitting side by side, facing the river. They were
modern and unremarkable, two stories high with white
walls and square windows. One of them advertised a mo-
bile phone company. The other could have been almost
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anything. A garage and auto-repair service stood oppo-
site them, close to the water’s edge, but it seemed to have
closed down.
The whole area was covered in rubble, with aban-
doned tires, oil drums, and empty skips. Alex had stopped
at the top of the drive, concealing himself behind a bro-
ken wire fence. He wondered how a place like this could
have just been left to decay. Put a few houses on it, with
views over the river, and surely it would be worth mil-
lions. But then again, this wasn’t somewhere people
would necessarily want to live. The noise of the traffic on
Wandsworth Bridge was endless and the air smelled of
diesel. Maybe a few run-down businesses was all it was
good for.
The man got out of his car, then reached into the back
and drew out the bag that he had been carrying on the
roof. It was the bag that contained his weapon. Peering
out over the rubbish, Alex got a better view of him. He
was short, in his thirties, dressed in an anorak and jeans,
with a cap hiding his hair. He was clean shaven and white.
His movements were completely leisurely, as if he were
on his way home after a round of golf. He closed the car
door, locked it with a remote on his key ring, and began
to stroll down toward the river. Alex chose his moment,
then freewheeled down the slope and came to a skidding
halt behind one of the skips.
What now? From this new angle he could see a con-
crete jetty sticking out into the fast-flowing water of the
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Thames. The jetty was T-shaped and long enough to ac-
commodate a dozen cars. But that wasn’t what was
parked there. A helicopter was waiting, a two-seater Rob-
inson R22, one of the most popular flying machines in
the world. Alex recognized the long tail, slanting upward,
and the tiny bubble of a cabin resting on its grasshopper
legs. It was perched at the far end, painted gray like the
water behind it. Someone must have landed it here for
the man in the VW. But if so, it couldn’t be taking him
very far. As far as Alex could recall, the Robinson had a
range of less than 250 miles. Still, that would be enough
to get it to the middle of France.
There was a narrow, three-story building at the other
end of the jetty, right next to the river. It could have been
a clubhouse for canoeists or perhaps some sort of outpost
for the river police. It was wooden, painted white—but
the paint was flaking and some of the windows were
cracked. Alex assumed it was empty, but then the door
opened and a second man came out, walking across the
jetty, heading toward the helicopter.
The two men were about to meet. Alex knew he had
to get closer, to hear what they said. He was still some
distance away, crouching beside the skip, but fortunately
the men were looking out over the river with their backs
to him. Abandoning his bike, he ran down toward them,
keeping low behind a slight rise in the ground. He was
afraid the sound of his feet on the gravel would give him
away, but the drone of the traffic was loud enough to
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cover it. He threw himself facedown just as the two men
met.
“So how did it go?” the man from the office asked.
“It
was fine. Mission accomplished,” the sniper replied.
He was lying. Surely he must have known that he had
missed his target. But maybe it wasn’t in his interest to
admit that he had failed. Not if he was hoping to be paid.
“Let’s go then,” the first man said.
They set off together, heading for the helicopter. So
was that it? Was he just going to sit there and let them fly
off? Alex memorized the registration number—
A5455H—on the helicopter’s tail. If he telephoned it
through to the police, maybe they could intercept the
Robinson before it could land. But it wasn’t enough. Alex
could still feel the anger. These people had broken in on
his life. They had tried to kill him and they had hurt his
best friend. And calling the police would probably do no
good at all. He remembered what had happened to the
car. The pilot might press a button and change the regis-
tration of the helicopter. Maybe it would turn bright pink
in midair. Suddenly Alex was determined. He wasn’t
going to let them get away.
He was up and running before he knew what he was
going to do. The men had reached the helicopter and
were climbing in. They were too busy concentrating on
their own movements to notice him. Alex sprinted diago-
nally across the yard and onto the other side of the jetty.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the sniper buckling
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himself into the backseat, his view obscured by the pilot,
who was leaning across him. Alex spun to the right, head-
ing away from them, and a moment later he had reached
the three-story building that he had noticed, the one from
which the pilot had emerged.
He couldn’t take the two men on by himself. He was
empty-handed. But there was always a chance he might
find something inside—a high-powered hose, maybe, or
anything he could use as a weapon. At the very worst
there might be a telephone. His own mobile was still at
school.
His hopes were dashed even as he burst in through the
front door. He saw that he was in an office complex that
might once have belonged to the river authority. The
walls were painted pale green and there were a few old
maps of the Thames and tidal charts pinned to a cork
notice board on a wall. But it was empty, abandoned. The
whole place smelled of damp and decay. He tried the
door of an office. It wouldn’t budge.
Outside, he heard the whine of the four-cylinder air-
cooled engine and knew that the Robinson had started
up. It would take about a minute for the rotors to achieve
maximum speed and then it would be gone, disappearing
into the sky and forever out of his reach. Alex looked
around him. There was nothing here, just locked doors
and a tatty staircase with peeling Formica, leading up.
The roof. Alex decided there was only one thing he
could do, one way he could get back at the sniper. The
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man in the anorak was pretending that he’d succeeded,
that he’d hit his target. Well, Alex would show him other-
wise. He would stand on the roof in full view and at least
the people who’d hired him would know that he’d failed.
Perhaps there would be some sort of punishment for lying
to them. Certainly he wouldn’t get paid.
He took the steps two at a time. On the third floor he
came across a fire extinguisher strapped to the wall, and
he grabbed it and wrenched it free. He didn’t really know
what he was doing. In his mind’s eye he saw himself
spraying the cockpit as the helicopter flew past, blinding
the pilot. But that was ridiculous. The wind would whip
the foam away before it got anywhere near. Could he
perhaps hurl the extinguisher at the rotors? It was cer-
tainly heavy enough to do serious damage. But it was also
too heavy to throw—and anyway, the helicopter would be
too far away.
But it was all he had, and he was still carrying it as he
clambered up the last staircase and crashed through a
pair of emergency exit doors onto the roof. It took him
just a few seconds to take in his surroundings. The river
was right in front of him. Wandsworth Bridge stretched
out to the left. The Robinson R22 was balancing on its
legs, already weightless, about to lift off the ground. The
pilot, wearing sunglasses now, with a pair of headphones
over his ears, was coaxing the joystick. The sniper was in
the seat behind him. Alex was above them both, but—as
he had thought—he was too far away. However, that
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might be about to change. In a few seconds’ time the two
men would fly right past him. They couldn’t go the other
way because of the bridge.
The helicopter lurched off the ground without any
seeming effort. It was moving diagonally, heading toward
Alex but at the same time away from him, over the water.
By the time it drew level, it would be at least fifteen yards
away. He couldn’t throw the fire extinguisher that far. If
he set off the foam, he would just end up soaking himself.
“If you want to stay in the top group, Spencer, try not
to behave like a fifth-grader.”
Somehow, incredibly, Alex remembered Mike Spen-
cer in the classroom, the moment after he had noticed the
sniper. He had been firing a piece of eraser with a bendy
ruler, aiming at another boy. Could it possibly work? Yes!
Why not? The TV antenna was right on the edge of the
roof, and the fact that it was swaying meant that it must
surely bend. The antenna had four metal rods that came
together in the shape of a V. Alex ran over to it. He hoisted
the fire extinguisher up so that it rested inside the V and
then, using both hands, pulled it back. The whole thing
bent toward him. Alex could feel the metal straining. If he
let go now, he would launch the extinguisher halfway
across the river. That was one advantage of being fifteen.
He hadn’t been this strong a year ago.
Suddenly the helicopter was level with him, filling his
vision. He could feel the wind from the rotors beating at
him, threatening to blow him off the roof, and the engine
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howled in his ears. His hair whipped around his eyes, half
blinding him. But he had a clear view of the sniper in the
back window. The man turned and saw him. His eyes
widened in shock. He shouted something. The pilot
seemed to have frozen too. The helicopter wasn’t mov
ing. It was just dangling there, a perfect target, right in
front of him.
Alex let go of the fire extinguisher. The TV antenna
whipped forward, propelling it like a medieval catapult.
The red metal cylinder hit the cabin, an oversized bullet
that smashed into the glass, sending cracks in every direc-
tion. It wouldn’t have been enough to bring the helicopter
down, but the pilot jerked back instinctively, losing con-
trol. Alex threw himself to the ground as the tail of the
helicopter swung around, scything through the air, inches
above where his head had just been. He felt another blast
of air tearing at his shirt and jacket, trying to drag them off
his shoulders. For a brief second he glimpsed the terrified
face of the sniper, upside down . . . or at least that was how
it seemed to him. The pilot was fighting for control and
might have regained it, but then the tail rotor clipped the
edge of the building and there was a dreadful grinding and
a snapping sound as part of the blade broke off. Lying flat
on the roof, Alex covered his head with his hands, afraid
that he was about to be torn to pieces. A slice of broken
metal shot past him and shuddered into the brickwork.
And then the helicopter was gone, yanked into the air
as if it were a fish on the end of an invisible line. It was
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completely directionless, the whole thing spinning around
and around. Alex dragged himself to his knees, gazing at
his handiwork with a sense of disbelief. The helicopter
was like a mad thing. He wondered what sort of night-
mare the pilot and his passenger must be experiencing
inside. It was still moving fast. Already it was a quarter of
a mile away, mercifully flying upriver, away from the
bridge. Alex stood up. The helicopter tried to right itself,
but it wasn’t going anywhere. It stopped, then crashed
down into the river. There was a great explosion of white
water and then nothing. Alex couldn’t see any more.
Were the two men dead? Alex didn’t know and, in
truth, he didn’t really care. He’d given them a lesson
they’d richly deserved. After all, they had just tried to kill
him. They had opened fire on a classroom full of kids and
they hadn’t cared what might result. Alex wondered if
Tom Harris was all right. He was sure the injury hadn’t
been too serious, but he knew all too well the shock of
being wounded by gunfire. He thought of phoning him,
then remembered that he had left his mobile in his locker
at school.
A couple of people had run out of the office and were
making their way across the yard to the jetty. Alex had
scratched and bruised his arms and knees when he threw
himself down. His school pants were torn. More needle-
work for Jack!
He limped back in through the emergency exit,
climbed down the stairs, and went in search of his bike.
9
S A F E T Y M E A S U R E S
SITTING IN THE BACKSEAT of his chauffeur-driven Jaguar
XJ6, Alan Blunt was in a bad mood. He hadn’t spoken a
word in the thirty minutes it had taken them to drive from
Liverpool Street, gazing out the window with narrow,
expressionless eyes as if the entire city had some- how
offended him. Mrs. Jones was next to him and she knew
exactly what he was thinking. The two of them were
breaking every rule in the book. They were on their way
to see Alex Rider when really he should have been sum-
moned to see them.
They already knew what had happened at Brook-
land—but then, of course, the whole country did. A gun
attack on a school in west London was the sort of story
that would travel instantly all over the world—and the
intelligence services had been forced to move quickly to
rein it in. This was Alex Rider’s school. They had made
the connection instantly and had done everything they
could to turn media attention away. There was no sniper,
they said, and certainly no sniper rifle. It was just some
local vandal with an air gun who had managed to break
into a building site and had fired a couple of shots at the
windows. One boy had been slightly injured but nobody
had been killed.
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Even so, the shooting had been the main story on all
the six o’clock news shows and would be on the front
pages the next day. Tom Harris had been filmed in his
hospital bed with one arm in a sling, surrounded by flow-
ers and chocolates and looking quite happy to be at the
center of so much attention. The police had mounted
roadblocks all over Fulham and Chelsea. The home sec-
retary had promised she would be making a statement to
the House. All the children at Brookland were being of-
fered counseling and the school would remain closed
until the end of the week.
As a result of the media frenzy, two other stories were
given less attention than they might otherwise have re-
ceived. In a completely unrelated incident, a helicopter
had crashed into the River Thames near Wandsworth
Bridge. The police were still looking for the pilot and pas-
senger. Neither had yet been named. And in Greece, one
of the world’s richest men, Ariston Xenopolos, had died
after a long fight against cancer. He had left behind a
fortune of more than thirty-five billion dollars.
Alan Blunt had been in one of his regular meetings
with the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the news came in. He
had left at once, joining Mrs. Jones for an emergency
briefing. It was obvious to both of them that Alex had
been the target. The sniper had missed—that much was
known. But Alex seemed to have disappeared. He had last
been seen cycling away from the school. When Blunt had
heard about the helicopter crash just one hour later, he
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had assumed at once that there must be a connection.
That would have been typical of Alex. He was a boy of
extraordinary resource.
Alex finally got home in the middle of the afternoon. Jack
was completely shocked by what had happened, and
when Mrs. Jones called her a short while later, she was in
no mood for an argument.
“We need to talk to Alex,” Mrs. Jones said. “We’ll send
a car around to bring him to Liverpool Street.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Jones.” There was ice in Jack’s voice.
“Alex isn’t going anywhere. I can understand that you
want to debrief him. But if you want to see him, you’re
going to have to come here.”
“That’s out of the question.”
“Fine. Then you can forget about talking to him.” Be-
fore Mrs. Jones could interrupt, Jack continued. “Every
time Alex has been into that building of yours, it’s been
nothing but trouble. The last time was November. He
came to see you because he had a journalist chasing after
him—and what happened? You sent him to spy on Des-
mond McCain and he ended up in Kenya being almost
fed to the crocodiles. Well, that’s all over now. He doesn’t
work for you anymore. If you want to talk to him about
what happened this morning, you can come over here,
but don’t make it too late. He’s had a tough day and I
want him in bed before ten.”
It was unheard of for the director of Special Opera-
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tions and his deputy to be summoned in this way. Secret
conversations need to take place in a secure environment
and Blunt’s office was exactly that. Nobody could enter
without being scanned . . . for weapons or for recording
devices. Any form of eavesdropping was out of the ques-
tion. The windows had even been treated to deflect radio
or microwave beams. It was impossible to find out who
had been there and for what reason. Visiting Alex at his
home in Chelsea would change all that. It was a com-
pletely unacceptable risk.
And yet, early that evening, the car drew up outside
the elegant white-fronted house that had once belonged
to Ian Rider, and Blunt and Mrs. Jones stepped out. Jack
had refused to budge from her position, and in the end
they’d had to accept that this was the only way. But then,
of course, Alex was no ordinary agent. Recruiting him in
the first place had broken all the rules. So perhaps they
should have been prepared to make an exception.
Alex was waiting for them in the living room. Blunt
could see at once that he was very different from the
fourteen-year-old he had so often employed. It wasn’t
just that he was bigger, that he had filled out more. He
was more confident too. Looking at him, Blunt was sud
denly reminded of Alex’s father. The resemblance was
really quite remarkable.
Jack offered coffee, which was politely declined. She
had already given Mrs. Jones a full description of what
had happened after Alex left the school and the deputy
director didn’t waste any time.
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“We’ve had divers and police down at the river,” she
began. “It seems likely that both the pilot and his passen-
ger managed to escape from the helicopter. Certainly no
bodies have been washed up.”
“You’d think someone would have seen two dripping
wet men climbing out of the water,” Jack growled.
“We’re still making inquiries. We’re still looking.”
Mrs. Jones glanced at Alan Blunt, sitting opposite her. “It
does seem strange that they managed to vanish into thin
air. This was broad daylight, in the middle of London.
They must have been injured. And yet as far as we can
tell, no one’s had any sight of them.”
“Did you see the sniper, Alex?” Blunt asked.
“Not really.” Alex had changed into jeans and a T-
shirt. He was barefoot, as if to stress that this was his
home and he would dress how he liked. It felt strange
having Blunt in the room, as if two worlds that should
have been kept apart had somehow collided. “He was too
far away and he had his back to me. But I got the num-
bers of the car and the helicopter.”
“They were both fake,” Mrs. Jones said. “We’ve got
the car—we picked it up from Wandsworth Park—and
we’re running tests for fingerprints and DNA. We’ve also
salvaged the wreckage of the helicopter. But I have my
doubts that either of them will lead us anywhere.”
“These were professional people,” Blunt agreed. “That
trick with the car wash, for example. That showed a cer-
tain style—”
“Whose style?” Jack asked.
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“We don’t know. We’ve spoken to the owner of the
garage. He says he was paid to close the car wash for a
couple of days and he doesn’t know anything else. We
think he’s telling the truth. But the main questions we
have to ask ourselves are—who would want to kill Alex,
and why now? And more to the point, how do we stop
them from trying again?”
Alex examined the head of MI6, who was sitting on
the edge of the sofa with a very straight back, as if he were
determined not to make himself comfortable. As usual,
Blunt was completely businesslike, dressed in a slate
gray suit with steel-rimmed spectacles and highly
polished black leather shoes. Despite what he had said,
he had somehow made it clear that it didn’t really matter
to him if Alex lived or died. This whole thing was just a
nuisance, something else to be dealt with in a busy day.
“They think I’m dead,” Alex said. “The sniper told the
pilot. He said ‘mission accomplished.’ I heard him.”
“That may not necessarily be the case,” Mrs. Jones
said—and once again she half glanced at Blunt as if she
wasn’t sure she should continue. “First of all, we have to
assume that the sniper was aiming at you. This will have
been a very risky and very expensive operation, so who-
ever was behind it must have a very serious reason to
wish you harm. It’s clear from what you say that the
sniper lied to his employers, but even so, they probably
guessed you’re alive. And when the helicopter crashed
five minutes later, they’d have known it for sure. Which-
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ever way you look at it, Alex, you’re probably still in dan-
ger, and I’m afraid it’s going to be out of the question,
your going back to school, until we’ve sorted this out.”
“How long will that be?” Alex asked with a sense of
despair. Some people might have thought him mad,
wanting to go back to school. But he’d been enjoying the
term. Everything had been going well for him. He wanted
to be with his friends.
“It’s impossible to say. We have no idea who the
enemy is or even why they’ve chosen this moment to at
tack you. Right now we have no clues. We’re as much in
the dark as you.”
“So how are you going to keep Alex safe?” Jack de
manded. “How are you going to stop them from trying
again?”
Blunt and Mrs. Jones exchanged a look, and at that
moment Alex knew they had already worked this out, that
they had known what they were going to say before they
had walked through the door. The same thing had hap-
pened after he had been attacked while he was surfing
with Sabina off the Cornish coast. They had used the
situation then. They would do the same now.
“I think Alex has to leave the country,” Blunt said.
“No way!” Jack exclaimed.
“Please, Miss Starbright. Allow me to finish. He can’t
go back to Brookland and he can’t stay here. As Mrs.
Jones just said, it’s too dangerous.”
“You could give him twenty-four-hour protection.”
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“We’ll have people watching the house tonight—but
in the long term, twenty-four-hour protection doesn’t
exist. If an enemy is determined enough, he’ll break
through the tightest barrier no matter how carefully it’s
been constructed. No. While we investigate this business,
Alex would be much safer with a new identity somewhere
far away.”
“Do you have somewhere in mind?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Blunt coughed delicately,
his hand forming a comma in front of his mouth. “I want
him to go to Egypt,” he said.
“Egypt?”
“To Cairo, to be precise. It just so happens that I
needed to send one of my people out there anyway—”
“Alex isn’t one of your people!” Jack cut in.
Blunt ignored her. He turned directly to Alex. “I
wasn’t going to involve you, Alex. You’ve made your feel-
ings very clear and of course I’ve tried to respect that. But
circumstances have changed. You need our help. We need
yours. I have a job that is ideally suited to you. At the
same time, it’ll take you far away and keep you safe.”
“What job?” Alex asked. The two words fell heavily
from his lips.
“Alex, no!” Jack whispered.
Alex avoided her eye. “What job?” he asked a second
time.
“It’s just a question of being in the right place and
keeping your eyes open for us. All we want you to do is
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report back and we’ll do the rest.” Blunt paused, waiting
for any argument, and when none came, he went on.
“The place is a school . . . a very good school, as it hap
pens, so you won’t even need to miss any of your studies.
It’s called the Cairo International College of Arts and
Education, but the students just refer to it as CC—or
Cairo College. It’s for boys and girls aged thirteen to
eighteen, although there’s a junior school too. Many of
the parents there are working in the Middle East. Some
of them are high profile. Some of them are very rich.
“We have received information that suggests some
sort of hostile activity could take place there sometime
soon. Unfortunately, we don’t know when and we have
no idea what exactly it might entail. A kidnapping might
be a possibility. Some of these parents could afford mil-
lions of dollars as a ransom, if it were demanded.”
“Have you warned the school?” Jack asked.
“We’re not sure that a warning would do any good,”
Blunt replied. “Not until we know more. However, we do
have one line of investigation. Last week, the school ap-
pointed a new head of security, a man by the name of Erik
Gunter. It seems very unlikely that he would be involved
in anything illegal. As a matter of fact, he’s a war hero. He
was decorated by the queen. But at the same time, we
can’t believe that his arrival is just a coincidence.”
“What happened to the last head of security?” Alex
asked.
Blunt swallowed. “He had an accident. All we’re asking
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you to do, Alex, is to keep an eye on this man and report
anything suspicious back to us. There’s no need for you
to get involved. At the first sign of any trouble, we’ll
step in.”
“Wait a minute!” Jack exclaimed. “I can’t believe you
people! We asked you to come here because someone just
took a shot at Alex. His best friend was almost killed! But
all you want is to use him again.”
“We want to protect him,” Mrs. Jones insisted. “Hon
estly, Jack. I was against this myself at first, but it does
seem to be the best solution. Nobody would think of
looking for him in Cairo. We’ll give him a false name. And
the best thing about an international school is that the
students come and go. The parents are always on the
move. Nobody will ask any questions when a new face
shows up. Meanwhile, we’ll investigate the car, the heli
copter, everything. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s safe
for Alex to come home. It shouldn’t be more than a few
weeks.”
She fell silent. Blunt was looking straight at Alex,
waiting for him to reply. Jack shook her head, clearly
unhappy. Alex realized it was all up to him. At the same
time he wondered if he really had any choice. Only that
morning, he had been celebrating the fact that his life had
returned to normal. Out of the tunnel—that was what he
had thought. How could he have been so naïve? The tun-
nel had reached out to draw him back in and once again
he was lost in its darkness.
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“I don’t mind going,” he said. “Mr. Blunt is right. If
there’s someone after me, I can’t stay here. I can’t risk
anyone else getting hurt because of me.”
“I could take you to America. We could go anywhere
in the world!”
“I need to be at school somewhere, Jack. I don’t want
to get any further behind.”
“Then we’re agreed?” Blunt said.
“Actually, I have a few questions,” Jack cut in. “Where
is Alex going to live in Cairo? Who’s going to look after
him? Is this international college a boarding school?”
“No.” Mrs. Jones shook her head. “We’ll have to find
him an apartment.”
“Then make sure it has two bedrooms, because I’m
going too!” Alex turned to Jack in surprise. He could tell
from the tone of her voice that there were going to be no
arguments. “I’m fed up sitting at home while you put
Alex in harm’s way,” Jack went on. “I know you’ve said
he won’t be in any danger—but that’s what you said last
time, and the time before. Well, if Alex agrees to go, that’s
his decision. But I’m not going to let him go alone. That’s
mine. Both of us or not at all. Your call, Mrs. Jones.”
Mrs. Jones thought for a moment, then nodded. “I
think it’s a good idea,” she said. “Alex?”
Alex was still gazing at Jack. “Are you really sure?” he
asked.
“I’ve never been more certain about anything.”
“That’s great.” Alex smiled. “We can see the pyra-
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mids together. And the Nile. And it’ll be fun to have you
with me.”
“You can leave all the arrangements to us,” Blunt said.
“I’ll alert our Cairo office that you’re on your way. They’ll
give you everything you need.”
“Then it seems we’re all agreed,” Jack said.
She got up and led Alan Blunt and Mrs. Jones to the
door. Their car was waiting for them, parked outside.
Meanwhile, Alex sat on his own, his head in a whirl.
Cairo! Part of him was excited. He couldn’t help himself.
It was an amazing city, somewhere he had never been
before. And yet at the same time, he felt a great weight on
his shoulders. It was all happening again.
Jack came back in. “They’ve gone,” she said. “Thanks,
Jack.” Alex got up. “Thanks for saying you’d
come with me.”
“I wasn’t going to let it happen any other way.” Just
for a moment, Jack remembered that she had been plan-
ning to tell Alex her plans this very evening. Had she
really been thinking of abandoning him, of moving on?
Well, her parents and Washington would have to wait. “I
guess they’ll have to give me a new ID too,” she said. “I
wonder what I’ll look like with a fake mustache.” She
sighed. “Are you going to do your homework?”
“I don’t think there’s any point.”
“Then why don’t I make us some supper? And you see
what’s on TV . . .”
• • •
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Alan Blunt was in a better mood as they headed back
toward Liverpool Street. Mrs. Jones had noticed the dif-
ference. “So you got what you wanted,” she said.
“Yes.” Blunt avoided her eye. “It’s funny how things
work out sometimes.”
“I think you forgot to mention that Scorpia might be
involved.”
“I didn’t forget. I preferred not to alarm him.”
“He might have decided not to go.”
“I would have said, all in all, that it’s better for him to
keep an open mind.”
They drove on in silence.
“I want him to have backup in Cairo,” Mrs. Jones an
nounced suddenly.
“Who do you have in mind?” Blunt knew that there
was a time when his deputy would never have spoken to
him so directly. But he would soon be gone. Power was
already transferring itself to her. “We could send Craw
ley, perhaps. Or Gerrard . . .”
“I was thinking of Smithers.”
“An interesting choice.”
“Alex trusts him. And he may come in useful, particu-
larly if Scorpia does show up. Do you have any objection?”
“Of course not, Mrs. Jones. Whatever you think best.”
The strange thing was that Blunt had been right all along.
He never should have left Liverpool Street and he cer-
tainly shouldn’t have visited Alex at home.
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He and Mrs. Jones had been filmed getting out of the
car from the window of the house opposite. The owners
of the house were on vacation in Thailand, and although
they should have returned by now, they had both fallen ill
with food poisoning and were being treated in a hospital
in Bangkok. Scorpia had arranged this, just as they had
arranged for one of their teams to break into the house
and set up their cameras on the second floor.
Alex’s home had also been bugged. Two men dressed
as telephone engineers had slipped in while Jack was out
at the shops and placed recording devices in the kitchen,
the living room, both bedrooms, and even dotted around
the garden. The entire conversation with Blunt and Mrs.
Jones had been recorded.
“I want him to go to Egypt . . . I have a job that is ide-
ally suited to you . . .”
“We’ll give him a false name . . .”
“I’ll alert our Cairo office that you’re on your way.
They’ll give you everything you need.”
It had all been recorded, on film and on tape, proof
that MI6 had once again employed Alex Rider and sent
him to the Middle East. It would be put into the Horse-
man file, and over the next few days, that file would start
to grow. Ariston might be dead, but his work would con-
tinue. Scorpia’s operation had begun.
10
W E L C O M E TO C A I R O
THE MAN FROM THE EMBASSY had introduced himself as
Blakeway, but Alex wondered if that was his real name. It
somehow suited him too well. He was thin, elderly,
hollowed out by the sun, and very English—wearing a
crumpled linen jacket, a striped tie, and a Panama hat.
He had been waiting for Alex and Jack at Cairo Air- port,
standing next to the metal tunnel that led from the plane.
“Miss Starbright? Alex? Very good to meet you. I’ve
got a car waiting for you. Do come this way.”
They set off at a leisurely pace. Blakeway didn’t look
like the sort of man who ever hurried. But it was good
having him with them. They were waved through pass-
port control. They didn’t have to join the long lines or buy
twenty-dollar entry visas from the banking kiosks.
Blakeway stood with them until their luggage arrived on
the carousel, then carried Jack’s cases for her, leading
them through the crowds of taxi drivers and tour opera-
tors clamoring on the other side of the arrivals gate.
The heat hit Alex full in the face. As they passed
through the sliding doors, leaving the terminal behind
them, it was almost like stepping into a furnace. Within
seconds his clothes were sticking to him and he felt his
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case dragging him down. Meanwhile, Blakeway was look-
ing around the concourse.
“Where’s Ahmed? I told him I’d be only a few min
utes. Ah! There he is!”
He waved at an official-looking black sedan that drew
up in front of him, and a small, round-faced man in a
white shirt and dark pants leapt out and began to busy
himself with the luggage.
“That’s better. You two can hop in the back. The car’s
got air-conditioning, thank goodness. It shouldn’t take
us too long to get across Cairo—apart from the blasted
traffic.”
A minute later they were on their way. The car was
cool inside and the seats were soft and comfortable, but
Alex couldn’t relax. He was worn out from the long jour-
ney and although he desperately wanted to fall asleep, he
knew it wasn’t going to happen. London didn’t just seem
a six-hour flight away. It was another world, and part of
him wondered when he would see it again. What a fool
he had been to think that MI6 would ever leave him alone.
Perhaps it had been the same for his uncle, Ian Rider—
and for his parents. They had all discovered the same
thing. In the end, there was no way out.
Sitting next to him, with her head resting against the
window, Jack Starbright seemed to know exactly what he
was thinking. She was wearing large sunglasses that cov-
ered most of her face, along with a floppy white hat, but
he could tell that she was concerned about him. She sud-
denly reached across and put a hand on his arm.
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“We don’t have to stay,” she said quietly, so that Blake
way wouldn’t hear.
“I know.”
“I noticed a flight to New York leaving in three hours.
We could be on it.”
“We’re here now, Jack. We might as well see what it’s
like.”
Was it even true? Alex wondered what would happen
if he asked the car to turn around, if he tried to get back
on a plane. Would MI6 let him leave Cairo? Alan Blunt
wanted him here and that was where he was. There would
be no departure until the job had been done.
“All right in the back?” Blakeway asked. He might
have overheard them talking after all. “We’ve got some
water here if you need it. Just shout . . .”
He had said the traffic would be bad and he hadn’t
been exaggerating. It was horrendous. They had joined a
six-lane motorway, but there still wasn’t enough room for
the thousands of cars jammed together, the drivers beep-
ing at each other furiously as if it would make any differ-
ence at all. Alex stared out the window. It seemed to him
that they had driven into a nightmare of steel and con-
crete, of sand and dust. Old-fashioned office blocks stood
next to crumbling houses. Here and there, slender towers
rose over the domes of mosques, but they were hemmed
in by radio masts, electricity pylons, and cranes, tons and
tons of ironwork fighting for control of the sky. Alex’s
first impression was that Cairo was not a fun city. It
certainly wasn’t somewhere he would have chosen to live.
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Somehow they fought their way through to the other
side. The traffic thinned out a little and they found them-
selves in a suburb, quieter and less densely populated
than the city center but still less than welcoming. Every-
thing seemed half finished. They were driving down a
street with palm trees and expensive Arabic-style villas on
one side, but piles of rubble and broken-down fences on
the other. For the first time, Alex saw the desert. It was
there, in the mid-distance, an endless wave of drab yellow
sand. It was as if Cairo didn’t dare go any farther. It just
stopped. And next to it there was nothing.
“Not much farther,” Blakeway said. He sounded re
markably cheerful. Alex wondered how long he had been
here. He turned to the driver and said something in Ara-
bic. The two of them laughed.
And then they drove into a bright, modern complex,
the automatic gates opening and closing behind them. It
was called Golden Palm Heights, a private community of
about fifty bleached-out houses and apartments sur-
rounding well-kept lawns with sprinklers twisting in the
sunshine and a good-sized swimming pool. It reminded
Alex of a vacation village the sort of place you might rent
for a week in the sun. The sedan drew in beside a neat
block of apartments with terraces overlooking the pool.
“This is it! Let’s go in. Ahmed can bring up the
luggage.”
They followed Blakeway up a staircase to a two-
bedroom apartment on the first floor. The door was open
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and he showed them in to a light, modern space with
marble floors, air-conditioning, and an open-plan living
room with sliding windows leading onto the balcony.
There was a large fridge-freezer, an electric oven and mi-
crowave, and a fifty-five-inch plasma-screen TV on one
wall. Everything was very clean. After the long journey,
Alex had to admit that he was pleasantly surprised.
“I’m going to leave you now,” Blakeway announced.
“I’m sure you want to get unpacked and go for a swim. If
you need anything, this is my number here.” He took out
a business card and snapped it down. “You’re only five
minutes from Cairo College and I’m sure someone will
turn up to show you around. Quite a lot of the students
and some of the teachers live here at Golden Palm Heights.
They’ll be here around four o’clock, after school, and
there’s usually a rush for the pool. I expect it’ll be quite
strange for you, Alex, being the new boy and all that.”
He went over to the window and glanced out, as if to
make sure they were alone. When he turned around, his
voice was lower and he sounded almost nervous. “I’m
told that one of your people will be coming here on Sun-
day evening,” he went on. “He’ll give you further instruc-
tions and see that you’re properly equipped. But that
gives you the weekend to acclimate yourselves, see a bit
of Cairo. It’s not such a bad place once you get to know
it. Well, I’ll wish you good luck, Alex. For what it’s worth,
I’ve heard about you, you know. A few whispers, anyway.
It’s very good to have met you.”
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He called for Ahmed and the two of them left. Jack
watched the car disappear through the gate. They were
finally alone.
“A swim, something to eat, or a nap?” she asked.
“All three,” Alex replied. “But let’s start with the swim.”
Jack was keen to unpack, so Alex dragged a pair of
trunks out of a case, got changed, and went down alone.
He dived straight in and did six lengths, pounding
through the cold water, leaving the heat and the grime
behind him. He was still there, splashing around and en-
joying himself, when the first students from Cairo College
arrived back at Golden Palm Heights, threw off their
backpacks and clothes, and dived in with him. Almost at
once he found himself surrounded by two boys and a girl
who were all about the same age as him and who seemed
delighted to have a new face in the complex.
The two boys were Australian; Craig Daniels and
Simon Shaw. Craig was tall for his age—in fact, he was
huge. He needed to shave but didn’t. Simon looked like
a surfer, from his tanned skin and long, fair hair right
down to the bead necklace and brightly colored trunks he
wore in the pool. The girl was named Jodie, and although
she had been born in England, she had lived most of her
life abroad. Her parents were both teachers, fortunately
not at the CICAE. She had freckles and straw-colored
hair cut short, and Alex liked her at once.
“Cairo College isn’t too bad,” she told him, in answer
to his questions. “It’s pretty relaxed and the teachers
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are okay. I spent two years in Singapore and that was
miserable.”
“How come you’re out here?” Craig asked. Like
Simon, his father worked in the oil industry. Quite a
few of the families at the school were supported by Shell
or BP.
It was the moment Alex had been dreading. It was
hard enough making new friends, and doing so on the
basis of a lie made it ten times worse. But he had no
choice. MI6 had given him a false name—Alex Tanner—
and had already rehearsed the story of his background
with Jack. She would support him if anyone asked her. “I
don’t have parents,” he explained. “My uncle works for
an international bank and they’ve recently started work-
ing in the Middle East. He’s not here right now. I have a
sort of guardian who looks after me. Everyone just de-
cided it would be easier for us to be here.”
Like all good lies, the story contained a lot of truth.
Ian Rider had pretended to be a banker before he’d died.
MI6 were certainly active in the Middle East. And Jack
was his legal guardian. At any event, it seemed to make
sense to Alex’s three new friends.
“It’s okay,” Craig said. “Once you get used to the heat
and the noise . . .”
“And the hawkers . . . ,” Simon added.
“And Miss Watson.” The three of them groaned.
“Welcome to Cairo, Alex. You’re going to love it here.”
• • •
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And over the next few days, almost despite himself, Alex
began to relax. He would start at the college on Monday.
Until then, he and Jack were tourists, on vacation to-
gether, and they could put the rest of it out of their mind.
The first thing they did was to visit the famous pyramids
at Giza, slipping in as the sun was rising and wandering
almost alone around the extraordinary monuments built
to house the bodies of dead kings almost five thousand
years before. They took a felucca, a traditional wooden
sailing boat, along the Nile. They explored Cairo together,
strolling through the crowded streets of the souk—the
local market—and haggling for things they didn’t even
want. They popped into mosques and museums, staying
just long enough to say they had been. They visited the
place where Moses had supposedly been found in the bul-
rushes and Jack got a picture taken of the two of them,
arm in arm, grinning like idiots.
Craig and Simon had both been right. The heat in the
city was almost unbearable, at least one hundred degrees
without any desert breeze, and the hawkers never left
them alone, trying to sell them everything from spices to
postcards. Cairo had no center and seemed to have no way
out. It was as if half of humanity had just piled in there
and had decided to stay.
But they didn’t care. They were enjoying themselves,
closer than they’d been for a long time. Alex felt as if he
had gone back five years, as if Ian Rider were still alive
and Jack were looking after him and every day in its own
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way was fun. He was almost glad that he’d been shot at.
This wouldn’t have happened any other way.
They didn’t hear from Blakeway again, but returning
home on Sunday evening, they noticed a new car parked
outside the apartment and realized that the MI6 agent he
had mentioned must have turned up. Sure enough, some-
one called from the front door, and to his surprise, Alex
saw a plump, familiar man waddling slowly toward them.
He had last seen Smithers in his office on the eleventh
floor of the Royal and General Bank in London, just be-
fore he had broken into the Greenfields research center
at Salisbury. Alex had always had a soft spot for the man
who had provided him with so many bizarre and useful
weapons during his time with MI6. Seeing him now, he
wondered how Smithers could possibly manage in this
heat. It wasn’t just the huge stomach, it was the three
chins, the round cheeks, the neck that seemed to be melt-
ing slowly into the shoulders. Smithers was bald with a
small mustache that reminded Alex of a comedian in one
of those old, silent, black-and-white films. He was wear
ing a linen suit that billowed around him like a parachute.
He was mopping his head with an oversized silk handker-
chief, but as he drew up in front of them, he stuffed it
back into his pocket.
“As-salaam alaikum, Alex,” Smithers chortled. “That’s
Arabic for ‘good evening.’ And you must be Jack Star
bright. How very nice to meet you.”
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“What are you doing out here, Mr. Smithers?” Alex
asked.
“Believe it or not, Mrs. Jones sent me to look after
you.” Smithers beamed. “Let’s go and talk inside, shall
we? I’m told you have a first-floor apartment. I hope it’s
not too many steps!”
They made their way up and soon the three of them
were sitting around the living room table. Alex had a glass
of iced grenadine—still his favorite drink. Smithers had
a can ok Coca Cola
“So you begin at the Cairo College tomorrow, Alex,”
he said. “My job is to help you and also, as it were, to be
the interface between you and London.”
“What’s going on in London?” Jack asked.
“They still haven’t found the helicopter pilot or his
passenger,” Smithers said. “And no bodies have turned
up, so we’re assuming they got away.”
“They tried to kill Alex. You must know who they
were.”
“I’m afraid not, Miss Starbright.” Smithers lifted his
can of cola. “Can I call you Jack? I feel I know you rather
well, even though we’ve only just met. And I must agree
with you. It’s all rather mysterious. I’m not sure how the
heli- copter managed to land in the middle of London in
the first place. It would have needed a flight plan, and for
that it would have had to have a proper license. But so far
all the trails have led nowhere.”
“Was it Scorpia?” Alex asked. He didn’t know why
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he had said that. The name had just dropped into his
head.
“I don’t know, Alex, old chap. They haven’t told me.
The good thing is that nobody knows you’re here in Cairo.
At least you’re safe.”
“You mean, he’s safe until someone tries to blow up
the school,” Jack growled. “Then he’ll be right in the
middle of it.”
“What exactly am I meant to do?” Alex asked. His face
brightened. “And what gadgets have you got for me, Mr.
Smithers? I’m sure you’ve got an exploding camel or
something.”
Smithers shook his head. For once, he was completely
serious. “This is a very unusual situation,” he said. “And
we have to be careful. All we know is that the school is a
target and a lot of young lives may be at stake. Imagine if
the whole place were taken over by armed criminals.
Such a thing has happened before, you know. Or sup-
pose some of these teenagers were taken prisoner . . .” He
pulled out a list of ten names and laid it flat on the table.
“For what it’s worth, these are the ten wealthiest
students at Cairo College.”
Alex glanced at the names. The third one down was
Simon Shaw. He was the blond-haired boy he’d met on
his first day. “I know him,” he said. “He was in the swim-
ming pool.”
“His father is Richard Shaw. He owns about half the
gas stations in Australia.” Smithers took the list and
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folded it away. “Don’t be fooled by the fact that the son is
living in an apartment just like you,” he said. “A lot of
these young people don’t want people to know how rich
their families are.”
That was an interesting thought. Perhaps Alex wouldn’t
be the only person at Cairo College with secrets to hide.
“We have to examine all the security systems in the
school,” Smithers continued. “Put simply, Alex, we need
to be sure that it’s safe. What about members of the staff?
Are there any teachers with problems? Now that I
come to think of it, my old history teacher suffered
from both. But we want to know about
anything that could open them up to blackmail.
“And then there’s this chap Erik Gunter. Now, I’ve
seen his file and I find it hard to believe that he’s turned
bad. He took six bullets for his regiment while he was in
Afghanistan. He spent nine weeks in the hospital recover-
ing. He has no criminal record of any sort. But at the
same time, he is their new head of security and it can’t
just be a coincidence that he’s turned up now. That’s
where you should concentrate your efforts. We want to
know everything he’s up to. Who he meets, how much he
spends . . . even what he has for lunch.”
Smithers had brought a small attaché case with him
and he opened it. The first things he took out were a pair
of rather chunky sunglasses and a bright red plastic water
bottle, the sort of thing sportsmen might use.
“These work together,” he explained. “Everyone at
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Cairo College carries water—and you can pour about a
quarter of a liter in the top part of this bottle. The equip-
ment is concealed in the bottom part. It’s new technol
ogy, Alex, and highly classified. What it does is it uses
people’s mobile phones against them. Point the bottle in
their direction and you’ll hear everything they’re hearing.
The speakers are inside the handles of the dark glasses
and go behind your ears. But it’s better than that. You can
actually activate mobile phones at a distance of up to fifty
meters and turn them into bugs. Two teachers having a
conversation in the yard? You’ll hear every word they
say.”
He took out what looked like an ordinary plastic light
switch. “This is the same design as all the light switches
at Cairo College,” he explained. “You can stick it on any
wall—there’s a resin on the back and nobody will notice
it’s there . . . one more switch among so many. It doesn’t
actually turn anything on or off, of course, but it’s got a
highly sensitive listening device inside and you can use it
to hear through walls. Again, it’s connected to the glasses.
“Finally, if you want to communicate with me, use
this.” He produced an old-fashioned notepad and a ball-
point pen and handed them to Alex. Both objects felt
slightly too heavy. “Anything you write or draw on this
notepad will appear instantly on my computer screen,”
Smithers said. “Scribble down SOS and I’ll be on my
way. I’ve taken a house in the middle of the city, by the
way, just off Al-Azhar Street, around the corner from
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the souk. I’ll give you the address or you can use the
sunglasses.”
“How do I do that?”
“There’s a miniaturized GPS built into the left lens.
You’ll find the switch on the top.” Smithers shut the case.
“I’m working on a few other thoughts,” he said, “but that
should get you started.” He took out the handkerchief
and patted at his face. “Trouble with this country is it’s
damnably hot,” he said.
“I’m going for a swim,” Alex said. “You can come with
me, if you like.”
“No, thank you, old chap. I never swim. I once in
vented a miniature submarine, but it was pretty hopeless.
For a start, I couldn’t fit into it. And floating doesn’t come
naturally to me. But you enjoy yourself!” He got up and
went over to the door. “Delighted to meet you, Jack. And
take care, Alex. I’ll show myself out!”
Alex and Jack waited until he had gone. Then Jack
picked up the sunglasses and examined them. “So that
was the famous Mr. Smithers,” she said. “He was com
pletely unbelievable.”
“You mean . . . his gadgets?”
“I mean the size of him! But I guess it’s good he’s on
your side.” Jack handed Alex the sunglasses and went
into the kitchen. “I’ll make some supper,” she said. “And
then you’d best be getting an early night. You’ve got to be
ready for your first day at school.”
11
T H E N E W B O Y
THE CAIRO INTERNATIONAL College of Arts and Edu-
cation was only a five-minute walk from the apartment,
just as Blakeway had said. When Monday morning finally
arrived, Alex set off with the two Australian boys, Craig
and Simon, who had offered to deliver him to the main
reception. Jack would have liked to have gone too but
understood that Alex would feel more comfortable with
kids his own age. But she still grabbed hold of him before
he went and gave him a quick kiss good-bye.
“It reminds me of the first time you went to Brook-
land,” she said.
And the strange thing was, Alex was aware of the same
nervousness that he’d felt when, aged thirteen, he’d left
for secondary school. His new uniform—dark blue trou-
sers and light blue polo shirt—felt ridiculous and he had
to remind himself that everyone would be wearing the
same thing. He guessed it didn’t matter how old you
were. These feelings never went away.
Cairo College even looked a bit like Brookland. It was
halfway down a wide, tree-lined avenue, a modern com-
plex with a main gate and buses turning in, cars already
pulling up outside, children of every age and size tum-
bling out, dragging backpacks and lunchboxes and pecu-
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liar class projects made out of wobbling cardboard and
paper. It occurred to Alex that schools all over the world
are more or less alike. After all, a classroom is a class-
room, a football field is a football field . . . and Cairo Col-
lege had plenty of both. Even the noise was the same: the
medley of shouting voices, the first bell, the stampede of
feet on concrete. Is there any other type of building that
identifies itself so quickly by the sound it makes?
What made Cairo College different was the burning
sunlight, the brightly painted yellow walls (surely no school
in England was ever painted yellow), the exotic plants and
palm trees, and the thin scattering of sand in the main
yard. The buildings had been designed so that the pas-
sageways were light and airy, opening onto different court-
yards with benches and tables grouped together under
wooden canopies so that everyone could have their lunch
outside. There was a junior school, with about a hundred
children aged eight to thirteen. But they were all contained
in a single block, next to an Olympic-sized swimming
pool. The three hundred boys and girls in the senior school
had the rest of the place to themselves.
Craig and Simon escorted Alex through the main gate.
They weren’t allowed to continue without presenting
their passes, which were electronically scanned by an
Egyptian guard. Alex noticed that the same was being
done for all the other students as they arrived. He was
held up while his own pass was issued with a photograph
that made him look as if he had just been mugged. Fi-
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nally, the two boys left him at an office on the other side,
where he was greeted by the school secretary, a smiling,
motherly woman with a thick Yorkshire accent who made
him fill out a lot of forms, gave him a copy of the school
regulations, and then took him into the room next door.
Here, he was surprised to find himself shaking hands
with the principal of Cairo College, a man in his fifties
who introduced himself as Matthew Jordan—“but every-
one calls me Monty.” He was a New Zealander, a shaggy,
easygoing man who obviously enjoyed his job.
“Alex, welcome to Cairo College. I hope you’re going
to enjoy yourself. I guess it’s all going to be a bit strange
at first, but we try to take things easy here. We don’t like
bullies and we don’t like show-offs, but you don’t look
like either, so I’m sure you’ll fit in fine. If you have any
problems, my office is always open. Every new kid who
comes here gets a mentor. Yours is waiting outside. Her
name is Gabriella and I’m sure the two of you will get
along. Good luck. I’ll see you around.”
Gabriella was sixteen and, it turned out, the daughter
of the Italian ambassador in Cairo. She had been at the
school for three years and—she wasted no time telling
Alex—she was looking forward to getting out. She al-
ready seemed to be bursting out of her uniform. Her nails
were painted bright red. From the way she walked, it was
as if the whole place belonged to her. She took Alex to
morning assembly, class registration, and then to his first
lesson. After that, he didn’t see her again.
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Monday at Cairo College . . .
It began with four one-hour classes, followed by
lunch. The college taught the same subjects as an English
school Perhaps it was too sensitive in this country. The
lessons were also more relaxed and the class sizes, with
only fifteen or sixteen
students, were small. Like the
students, the teachers came
from all over the world, and
maybe because they were so far from home, they all felt a
need to mix in. Alex’s math teacher was from America, his
history teacher was South African, and his English
teacher was actually Japanese. They weren’t quite on
first-name terms, but Alex thought that if he stayed at the
school long enough, they could easily become so.
Lunch was served out in the courtyard, a choice of
salads, sandwiches, wraps, and pizzas. Again, because
this was Egypt. Alex wondered where he should sit, but he
needn’t have worried. Craig, Simon, and Jodie were
waiting for him and called him over to their table. They
seemed keen to introduce him to their tenth-grade
friends, and from the way they de- scribed him, they
could have met him months ago rather than a few days
before.
“Tanner? That’s a Scottish name.” The speaker was a
stocky ginger-haired boy named Andrew Macdonald,
who was of course Scottish himself. There were quite a
few boys from Scotland at Cairo College, connected by
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the oil industry. Alex had already noticed that they were
the one national group that preferred to stick together.
“I’m not Scottish,” Alex said.
“That’s your bad luck. So why are you here?”
Once again Alex went through his story. The fake
name, the fake history. He still hated having to do it. He
could feel it separating him from the rest of them.
“So where are your parents?” someone asked.
“They died a long time ago.”
“That’s tough . . .”
“I’ve gotten used to it.”
“How long do you reckon you’ll be here?” Andrew
asked.
“I don’t know. They haven’t really said.”
There were two more lessons in the afternoon, then
gym, then ECAs, which stood for Extra Curriculum Ac-
tivities and included everything from drama to swimming
and trekking in the desert for an International Award.
The school secretary had told Alex to put his name down
for at least two activities, and he had chosen drama and
soccer—although he couldn’t imagine kicking a ball
around in the intense heat. The last class was French,
which was hardly needed, as most of the students at Cairo
College spoke two or three languages anyway. It was
taught by Joanna Watson, the teacher whose name had
been mentioned in the pool at Golden Palm Heights.
Alex supposed that every school had to have a Miss
Watson; permanently scowling, short-tempered, unloved,
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and proud of it. She was short and bullish and had threat-
ened him with his first detention before she’d even intro-
duced herself.
It was at the very end of the day that Alex had his first
encounter with Erik Gunter.
The head of security appeared as Alex was leaving,
letting himself out of his office on the ground floor. The
two of them were suddenly face-to-face and eyed each
other warily.
“Good afternoon. You’re the new boy. Alex Tanner?
Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My name is Erik Gunter.” Alex recognized the
Glasgow accent. “I’m also new here. I just started this
month.”
Gunter was younger than Alex had expected, not quite
thirty. It was obvious that he had been in the army. He
was incredibly fit, with the sort of overdeveloped muscles
that might have been made for tattoos—not that Alex
could actually see them beneath the black suit he was
wearing. He had dark hair, but he had shaved it close to
the skin, leaving only a shadow. He had a high forehead
and glinting, sunken eyes. He wasn’t tall—in fact, he and
Alex were about the same height—but Alex had no doubt
that if it ever came to a fight, Gunter would be faster,
stronger, and dirtier than him. He decided at once that it
would never happen. If Gunter really was involved in
some sort of conspiracy, MI6 could deal with him. This
was one man he would leave well alone.
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“Are you a teacher here?” Alex asked. He felt a need
to say something.
“No. I look after security. Do you feel secure, Tanner?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Well, keep out of trouble and you’ll stay that
way. I’ll see you around.”
Gunter made his way down to the main door. Alex
saw that he walked with difficulty, that he even had dif-
ficulty opening the door. He wasn’t slow, but his whole
body was somehow lopsided, as if the different parts
weren’t receiving the right signals from his brain. Noth-
ing about him quite worked and Alex remembered that he
had been shot several times in Afghanistan. Was he really
the enemy? The man was a war hero—and in his own way
he had been friendly enough. Alex already felt bad about
spying on him.
As far as Alex was concerned, that should have been
the end of this first day at the Cairo International College
of Arts and Education. He was looking forward to getting
back to the apartment and telling Jack everything that
had happened. But there was still one last encounter
waiting for him and it was a very strange one.
He had managed to drift behind the other students
and was virtually alone as he walked toward the main
gates. The guards were checking everyone’s IDs and the
last of the buses was just pulling out. The sun hadn’t
started to sink, but there was a pink hue in the sky and a
sense of calm in the air. Alex pulled out his card so that it
could be scanned. And it was at that moment that he got
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the impression that he was being watched. Actually, it
was stronger than that. He was quite certain of it. It was
like an electric shock, a shudder of something running
through him as he became aware of somebody’s eyes bor-
ing into him.
Slowly he turned his head and for just a moment he
spotted a figure in a downstairs window, looking at him
from behind the glass. It was Gunter’s office. Alex was sure
of it. But it couldn’t be Gunter, as Alex had just seen him
leave. It looked like a boy. Alex was sure he was wearing a
school uniform. He glimpsed fair hair. The boy’s face was
just a blur. Alex tried to make it out, but almost at once, the
boy moved away and instantly disappeared, like a mirage
in the desert. Perhaps he had never been there at all.
But in that brief second, the heat of the afternoon was
replaced by a shiver of something that he didn’t quite
recognize, as if something unpleasant from the past had
chosen to reappear. He stopped and took a deep breath,
forcing himself to forget what had just happened. He was
allowing things to get on top of him. He had to focus his
mind on what lay ahead.
The window was empty.
Alex hurried through the main gates. He didn’t look
back.
Jack was waiting for him when he got home. She’d spent
the morning at the famous Egyptian Museum, looking at
the treasures of the boy king Tutankhamun. In the after-
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noon she’d gone shopping and she’d even met some of
the other parents living at Golden Palm Heights. They’d
all been very welcoming. Like their children, they were
displaced and needed to make friends.
Alex quickly told her about his first day at the college.
“You know, Jack, I think I’m actually going to quite like
it there. Everyone’s really friendly. The school’s okay.
And at least it’s not raining.”
“That’s good, Alex. Maybe this is all going to work out
after all.”
And yet, much later that night, after he’d had dinner,
done his first batch of homework, and watched half a bad
film on satellite TV, Alex wondered. He had taken the
smaller of the two bedrooms and was sitting at a desk
with views over the back of the complex. There were no
curtains and the night was very black, dotted with stars.
The air-conditioning was on full and he could feel it
blasting over his shoulders. He’d opened his laptop and
logged into Facebook. The photograph on his profile page
had been taken on a mountaineering vacation with his
uncle, Ian Rider. The two of them were sitting next to each
other on a ridge, both of them with ropes coiled over their
shoulders. He wondered why he had chosen it.
He had eighteen messages, nearly all of them from his
friends at Brookland. The first one was from Tom Harris:
Hey, Alex. Where are you, man? I’m out of hodpital
and now I know whatit feels like to be shot. Hurt like
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hell. ThANKs for dragging me down as I’d have just
stod there and let that nutter hit me a secod time.
I guess he ws aiming at you. Yes? Hope this doesn’t
mean you’re in troubble again. Let me know, if you
can. EVEryone talking about it. Brookland on News at
10, Daily Mail, Sun ETC. Now we’re not allowed to talk
to anyone. Typimg this with one hand. Two weeks off
school plus counseling. Ha ha ha. TOM
He quickly looked through the rest but didn’t reply. How
could he explain what had happened in the last few days?
Finally, he opened a message from Sabina:
Alex . . . we saw Brookland on the TV and heard what
happened. I can’t believe someone tried to shoot you.
Where are you now? Mum and Dad really worried about
you and guess this has got something to do with you-
know-what. You said you weren’t getting into all that
again. Really worried about you. James told me you’ve
disappeared so hope you’re somewhere safe. Let me
know!!! Sab xxx.
Sitting on his own, framed against the darkness, Alex
suddenly felt isolated, as if he were trapped in some sort
of cyberspace, between two worlds. Here, in Egypt, he
was Alex Tanner, in a new school, making new friends.
But none of it was true and as soon as the job was done,
MI6 would pull him out and he would disappear so to-
tally and so immediately that it would be as if someone
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had just pressed the delete key. And yet, what of his old
friends, his real life in London? After what had happened,
would he ever be able to return to it? Or had the sniper
snatched it away for good?
He was about to turn the computer off and go to bed
when he noticed he’d been sent a new e-mail. He reached
out for the mouse and double-clicked.
Hi Alex,
Julius G wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Respond now:
For a long minute he gazed at the screen, at the brief
message and the green panel: CONFIRM FRIEND. He didn’t
know anyone named Julius, but that wasn’t so unusual.
He’d connected with lots of people he’d never met. So
why did the name make him feel so uneasy? He thought
again of the boy he had glimpsed in the window at Cairo
College. It had been a boy, he was sure of it.
Right now, Alex felt he needed all the friends he could
get. But not this one. He didn’t know why, but some in-
stinct told him to stay away.
Alex pressed the button: IGNORE.
He turned off the computer and went to bed.
Over the next two weeks, Alex fell into the natural rhythm
of Cairo College. Monday was the quietest day of the
week. Wednesdays were the worst, with the biggest pile
of homework. School food was okay so long as you
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avoided the pasta. He worked out which teachers he liked
best and which ones he preferred to avoid, and he made
plenty of new friends. He was still the new boy, but in an
international school like this, with people coming and
going all the time, people were more quickly accepted. At
the end of the first two weeks he was called back into
Monty Jordan’s office and given his first report.
“You’re doing very well, Alex,” the principal told him.
“Your teachers all say you’re making good progress, al-
though Miss Watson thinks you could focus a little more
in French. How are you finding it?”
“I’m okay, thank you, sir.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. By the way, I see you’ve
applied to join my politics set.” This was one of the Extra
Curriculum Activities. Alex knew that the Scottish boy,
Andrew, and Craig were both in the group, which met
once a week to discuss stories that had appeared in the
newspapers. They also took part in a miniature version of
the United Nations, with everyone pretending to be a dif-
ferent country. According to Craig, the last session had
ended with Belgium invading Holland and China declar-
ing war on everyone else.
But Alex wasn’t interested in politics. He looked puz-
zled. “Actually, sir, I didn’t apply.”
Mr. Jordan frowned. “Didn’t you? That’s strange.
Your name’s down on the list.” He took out a sheet of
paper and examined it. “That’s right. You’re definitely
here. Why don’t you join us anyway? We’ve got a couple
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of interesting events coming up and you might find it’s
fun.”
Alex shrugged. It didn’t make any difference to him—
and it made sense not to offend the principal. “All right,”
he said.
“Great. I’ll see you later in the week.”
And so he talked politics, he played soccer (seven-a-
side in the air-conditioned gymnasium), and he even got
a small part in the Cairo College production of Blood
Brothers. That made him think of Brookland. Right now
he should have been rehearsing for their production of
Grease. It struck him as odd that no matter where in the
world he went, there were people trying to make him
sing.
And yet Alex couldn’t settle in completely. Although
part of him felt ashamed of himself, he had a job to do.
He wasn’t here as a schoolboy. He was here as a spy. And
that set him apart. There wasn’t a moment when he was
able to forget it.
The transmitting device that Smithers had given him,
concealed in the bottom of his water bottle, worked bril-
liantly. It turned every mobile phone into a bug, and
wearing the sunglasses, Alex was able to pick up conver-
sations across the school yard. At the same time, though,
it told him a lot of things he didn’t want to know. Miss
Kennedy, who taught chemistry and physics, was having
an affair with Mr. Jackson, who was in charge of sports.
Miss Watson had a mother in the hospital in England and
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was desperately worried about her. Monty Jordan had
just applied for another job in a school in New Zealand.
These people weren’t criminals or terrorists, and Alex
hated prying on them. It made him feel shabby.
There was also a limit as to how much he could pick
up. The guards spoke Arabic, so there was no point
eavesdropping on them. And although he saw Erik
Gunter a few times, the head of security seemed to make
a point of never speaking to anyone. Alex had positioned
one of the fake light switches outside Gunter’s office and
had spent as much time as he dared lingering in the cor-
ridor, listening to what took place inside the room.
Gunter had made a couple of phone calls—one to a com-
pany that maintained the school alarm system, one to a
doctor to order more painkillers. Either he was very care-
ful or completely innocent. Alex still wasn’t sure which.
At the same time, he did his best to assess security at
Cairo College, the other half of the job that Blunt had
given him. It was strange to sit in the courtyard and try
to imagine himself as a criminal. But if he were going to
target the school, where would he begin? Who would be
his first target?
And the truth was bleak. The school had guards,
identity cards, security cameras, wire fences, and alarms.
But none of the guards were armed, and any well-organized
group would be able to break in and take over the place in
minutes. And if they were thinking about kidnapping—
perhaps one of the names on the list that Smithers had
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brought to the apartment—they wouldn’t even need to
come close. Simon Shaw, the son of the Australian gaso-
line king, walked home every day. Anyone in a car could
just pull up and drag him in. All the rich kids at Cairo Col-
lege were determined to live an ordinary life. And that
meant no bodyguards, no armor-plated sedans, hardly any
security at all.
The one weak link, the only lead they all had, was Erik
Gunter. He was the new security officer. He must have
been recruited for a purpose. If Alex could just break into
his office, perhaps he might be able to pick up a clue and
bring this whole business to an end.
On Friday afternoon, at the end of his second week,
Alex stopped in front of the room on the ground floor,
near the main entrance. The windows were locked and
barred, but he had often seen Gunter going in and out
through the door. He didn’t use a key. He pressed his
thumb against an electronic scanner and the door clicked
open. Alex quickly checked out the technology. Behind
the glass panel was a light sensor system, the same sort
of thing that could be found in any digital camera. This
would take a picture of Gunter’s thumb, which would be
turned into a series of dots by an analog-to-digital con-
verter. Somewhere in the system, there was a second pic-
ture. If the two matched, the door would open.
Alex needed Gunter’s thumb . . . and it needed to be
connected to his hand. Cutting it off and pressing it
against the glass wouldn’t work. Nor would a photo-
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graph. Cairo College had installed a sophisticated system
that also incorporated a pulse and a heat sensor. Only the
real, living thing would do.
But surely that was possible.
Alex took out the notepad and pen that Smithers had
given him. Working quickly, he sketched an illustration
of the door and the keypad. He wrote down the trade
name—Securi-Scan—and the serial number. Then, un-
derneath, he scribbled a message: Can you get me in?
He underlined it, then closed the pad and put it away.
The image and the question should have instantly ap-
peared on Smithers’s computer screen. Hopefully he
would come up with a solution over the weekend.
Alex picked up his backpack, threw it over his shoul-
der, and set off home.
12
IN T H E P I C T U R E
ERIK GUNTER WAS AWAY for the whole of Monday at
some sort of conference in Alexandria, handing over se-
curity to his assistant, an Egyptian named Naquib who
spent the entire day either drinking Aric tea or dozing in
the sun. It was infuriating to know that Gunter’s office
was empty—but Alex couldn’t break in without him. He
had to wait for his return and it wasn’t until the end of
Tues- day that he finally got his chance.
It had been another ordinary school day, but Alex had
been unable to concentrate, knowing that he was about
to make his move. He had noticed Gunter at lunchtime,
sitting with some of the teachers, drinking a glass of milk.
He had never actually seen the head of security eat any-
thing solid. Somehow he had managed to get through
French, history, math, and all the rest of it. He’d gone
swimming, rehearsed the school play. And finally he was
on his own, hanging back after the last lesson had ended.
He was fairly sure that he was the only boy left in the
school. It was now half past three. The gates would be
locked at four o’clock—allowing him a window of just
thirty minutes. It might not be enough.
By now, Alex knew the movements of Gunter, Na-
quib, and everyone else whose job it was to patrol the
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school and keep it safe. Gunter returned to his office at a
quarter to three every day. He worked there for about
twenty minutes, then went over to the main gate to watch
the students leave. It was surprising that this was one part
of his army training that he seemed to have forgotten. He
repeated himself—and repetition is a gift to the enemy. It
makes you predictable. It makes you an easy target.
Alex waited in the corridor close to the office until
there was a click and the door opened. He moved for-
ward, timing it so that he arrived just as Gunter emerged.
He glanced briefly inside before Gunter closed the door.
The lock engaged automatically.
“Tanner!” The security man was surprised to see him.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you,” Alex said.
“Why?”
Alex put his hand in his pocket. “I found this.” He
took out an iPhone and handed it to Gunter.
“What about it?”
“Well, someone left it in class. I tried to start it up, but
it’s locked. I thought you could find out who it be- longs
to and hand it back.”
Gunter scowled. With his shaven head and hostile
eyes, he had the sort of face that showed anger very eas-
ily. “Lost property is no business of mine. You’ve got to
hand it in at the gate. They’ll put up a notice and who-
ever’s left this can claim it when they get into school to-
morrow.” He handed it back and began to move away,
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again with that strange, fumbling progress that suggested
his muscles and skeleton weren’t quite working together.
He had taken only two steps when he turned around.
“How are you getting on here?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Alex said.
“But you must be missing your friends in London.”
“Yes. But I’ve got a lot of friends here too.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”
Gunter clumped his way down the corridor, leaving
Alex wondering how he could possibly have known that
he came from London. Of course, Gunter could have
looked at his file. But that was in the main office—and
why would he have bothered to search it out? It was an
interesting slip. Alex made a mental note of it.
The corridor was empty. It was three thirty-five. Alex
was still holding the iPhone, cradling it in the palm of his
hand, being careful not to place his own fingers on the
screen. He hadn’t actually found it. In fact, it had arrived
over the weekend, sent by Smithers and delivered in a
padded envelope with a single sheet of instructions. Alex
tilted the iPhone, checking the screen. Yes. Gunter had
left a perfect thumbprint. He searched for the little button
on the side and pressed it. There was a slight buzzing
sound and the whole thing began to vibrate in his hand as
the image was reversed and then reproduced. It took
about twenty seconds, and then a thin sheet of pink latex
slid out of a slot where the power cable would normally
have been attached. Alex pressed his own thumb onto
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it, then wrapped the sides around. If the machine had
worked, he would now be “wearing” Gunter’s thumb-
print—but then, when had Smithers ever let him down?
He touched his thumb with the latex covering to the
screen. The machine read the thumbprint, at the same
time registering the blood temperature behind it, and the
door clicked open immediately. Somewhere, in the near
distance, someone called out. Alex didn’t move. It was
one of the guards. If he came along the corridor now and
saw the open door, that would be the end of it. But then
he heard footsteps going up the stairs to the first floor.
He looked left and right. He knew there were no cameras
here, but anyone could appear at any moment. Gunter
would be back in around twenty minutes. He had to move
fast.
He went in and shut the door behind him.
The office was exactly as he had imagined it would be:
clean, very tidy, half empty. There was a desk, a couple
of
chairs, a steel filing cabinet, bookshelves, and very little
else. A large window, barred on the outside, looked to-
ward the main gate. This was surely where the boy had
been standing, spying on Alex as he left. Fortunately,
Gunter had lowered the blinds before he left, so Alex
could move freely without fear of being seen.
He began with the desktop. There was a diary with a
few notes scribbled in English—but they all seemed to
relate to meetings within the school and there were no
addresses or telephone numbers of any interest. Gunter
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had received about a dozen letters. Alex flicked through
them. There were several job applications. A salesman
from an alarm company was trying to make an appoint-
ment. The wife of the Italian ambassador had written in
to complain about locals at the school gates wolf-whistling
Gabriella. Again, there was nothing to suggest any con-
spiracy, but then of course Gunter was a careful man.
Even though his office was locked, he wouldn’t have left
any evidence in view.
Alex examined the bookshelves. Gunter seemed to like
murder mysteries and thrillers. There were books by Ag-
atha Christie and Andy McNab. A guide to Egypt stood
next to a thick volume called Teach Yourself Arabic. Nei-
ther of them seemed to have been opened. Otherwise the
shelves were empty. Nor were there any pictures on the
walls. The room gave the impression of someone who
had just arrived or who was about to leave. Maybe Gunter
didn’t expect to be at Cairo College very long.
Next, Alex turned to the filing cabinet. It was locked
and he was annoyed that he hadn’t asked Smithers for
something to help him break in. He remembered the zit
cream he had been given on his first assignment. A few
drops of that would have quickly burned through the
metal. Well, he could always come back to the office an-
other time, provided he hung on to the latex thumb.
He returned to the desk and tried the drawers. The
first contained pens, envelopes, a flashlight, and a pile of
report sheets, which Gunter must have been expected to
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fill in every day. The second drawer looked like a medi-
cine chest. It was filled with different pills and a bottle of
some sort of white liquid that smelled of peppermint. It
reminded Alex that Gunter was a sick man, a wounded
soldier—and for a brief moment he was tempted to leave.
He had no right being here, trawling through someone’s
private life. But it was too late to worry now. He had a job
to do. He might as well get it over with.
Somebody knocked on the door.
Alex froze as a voice on the other side called out in
Arabic. It might have been the guard he had heard earlier.
Was he looking for Gunter? Or had he somehow worked
out that there was an intruder inside? There was nothing
Alex could do. If the door opened, there was nowhere to
hide. Ten seconds passed. Alex listened to the sound of
his own heart beating. Nobody came in. Whoever had
been there must have gone.
Moving more quickly now, afraid that he might be
discovered at any minute, Alex tried the third drawer. It
was empty apart from a couple of brochures, advertising
the college. He swung it shut again, then opened it a sec-
ond time. Was it his imagination, or had something me-
tallic moved somewhere inside the drawer? He had heard
it, a distinct rolling sound followed by the clunk as it had
hit the wooden edge. He took the brochures out. There
was nothing underneath them. Unless . . .
Alex placed his hand flat on the bottom of the drawer
and pushed. It tilted and he saw that he had discovered a
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false bottom, that there was a secret compartment under-
neath. Gunter had dropped a Biro into the hidden space
and it had rolled from one end to the other with the move-
ment of the drawer.
What else was there? Alex put his hand in and pulled
out a gun, made in Russia with a star engraved in the
handle. Was that something Gunter kept for his job at the
school? And if so, why was it concealed here? It had been
resting on top of a map . . . the edge of the Sahara and an
oasis town called Siwa. It seemed an unlikely vacation
destination, although Cairo College did sometimes orga-
nize trips into the desert. Next out was a newspaper, a
copy of the Washington Post, about a week old. The front
page was given over to a big article about the president’s
plummeting approval ratings and, underneath it, a smaller
one about pollution in the Gulf of Mexico. There might
be something relevant inside, but Alex didn’t have time to
read it. MI6 could buy the same edition and do that for
themselves. Alex memorized the date and set the paper
aside.
There was nothing else in the drawer except for a
bundle of photographs. Alex spread them out over the
surface of the desk and examined them. Most of them
showed a large domed building that reminded him of the
Albert Hall in London but that, from the palm trees that
surrounded it, was more likely to be somewhere in Cairo.
The pictures had been taken from every angle. There
were cars parked outside and people—many of them
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young and carrying books—crossing the lawns that sur-
rounded it. Some sort of school or university? This was
a modern, liberated place. Some of the women were in
jeans and hardly any of them were wearing head scarves
or veils.
And then there was a picture of a room, perhaps inside
the domed building. It wasn’t so much a room as a wide
storage closet or a cellar. Alex saw red tiles, old paint cans,
and a mop in a bucket, leaning against a corner. What on
earth could Gunter want with a photograph of this? The
next picture was even stranger. It was a close shot of a
coat hook, presumably in the same room. The hook was
in the middle of a brick wall, shaped like a swan’s neck.
The edge of the metal had caught the flash, which was
blurring much of the image. It certainly wasn’t going to
win any prizes in a “Views of Cairo” competition.
There was one picture left. Alex turned it over and
frowned. He was looking at a photograph of himself. It
must have been taken sometime in the past two weeks. It
showed him in full school uniform, walking through the
gates at the end of the day. The photographer must have
been inside Gunter’s office. Alex was in the far dis- tance,
barely more than an inch high. But it was definitely him.
The definition was good enough for him to see his own
face. Even so, there was something about it that puzzled
him. He examined it carefully. There was defi- nitely
something wrong.
Alex took out his own iPhone—a real one with a three-
megapixel camera—and took snaps of all the pho-
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tographs he had looked at. Then he carefully returned
them to the secret drawer, making sure they were in the
same order he had found them, and laid the gun on top.
He wondered if MI6 would be able to make anything out
of them. Well, it was up to them now. He had finally
achieved something. Maybe he had even bought his ticket
back home.
Alex made sure he had left nothing behind, then tip-
toed over to the door and listened. There was nobody
outside.
He slipped out into the corridor and quickly walked
away.
It was almost four o’clock. He was very late leaving. If
anybody asked him what he was doing, he would say he
had forgotten his homework and gone back for it. He
passed the school secretary’s office—there was nobody
there—and went through the main doors, back into the
searing heat of the yard. The gates were ahead of him. A
couple of guards were standing there, thinking their work
was done.
And then he saw Gunter on the far side of the yard. He
was talking on his mobile phone with his back slightly
toward the school as if he was afraid of being seen. It was
too good an opportunity to miss. Alex was already wear-
ing his sunglasses. He stepped back into the shadows and
took out his water bottle. He pointed it in the right
direction, and a second later he heard Gunter’s voice, so
clearly that he could have been standing next to him.
“The House of Gold. Yes, of course I know it.” There
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was a pause. “Five o’clock tomorrow. I’ll come alone . . .
Do you think I’m an idiot? And if I’m satisfied, I’ll autho-
rize the final payment.”
Gunter hung up, then walked away, disappearing
around the side of the building. Alex waited a minute,
then darted toward the main gate. Suddenly, things
seemed to be happening very quickly. The head of secu-
rity must be on his way to some sort of secret meeting. A
payment was involved. It had to be part of the conspiracy
that MI6 was looking for. Alex had passed through the
gate and realized he was standing in exactly the same spot
where his picture had been taken. And it was then that he
knew what was wrong.
In the photograph that he had seen, he had been
standing on his own . . . as he was now. But he had never
once left the school on his own. He was sure of it. Simon
or Craig walked home with him every day. If it wasn’t
them, it was Andrew or one of the other Scottish boys.
Always there were other kids around. Alex left at the same
time as everyone else.
So where had they gone? Had they all been airbrushed
out? Or was he simply wrong? Had there been a moment
when his image could have been captured with nobody
else about?
It didn’t matter. The House of Gold at five o’clock the
next day. Wherever it was, Alex planned to be there, and
in his hurry to get back to the apartment, he didn’t look
around and didn’t see Gunter emerge from the side of the
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school to watch him, his lips stretched in a thin smile.
Nor did he hear him make a second call.
“He listened in on the conversation. He’s taken the
bait. He’s clearly not quite as clever as he’s cracked up to
be. He’ll be there tomorrow. I know what to do.”
13
T H E H O U S E OF G O L D
ALEX FOUND IT EASILY enough on the Internet. The
House of Gold turned out to be some sort of shopping
center specializing in jewelry. Fine gems and all your gold
& silver dreams. That was how it advertised itself on the
website. Come and seek us for the best prices in Cairo.
The name should have given it away, but it still seemed
an unlikely destination for a man like Erik Gunter.
“Perhaps he’s just going to buy a ring for his girl-
friend . . . or his wife, if he has one,” Jack suggested.
“He said he was going to authorize the final pay-
ment,” Alex said. “You don’t do that with a wedding
ring.”
“He doesn’t have to be meeting a jeweler. He could be
meeting anyone.”
“It’s a strange place to want to meet . . .”
The two of them were sitting in the living room of
their apartment. Jack had been waiting for Alex with two
glasses of ice-cold lemonade and a plate of sandwiches.
He was normally hungry when he got back from school.
Outside, the swimming pool was crowded . . . There was
a rough version of water polo going on, and Craig and
Jodie had called out to Alex to join them as he passed. But
he had gone straight to the computer. houseofgold.org.
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Then he had told Jack what had happened, what he had
found inside Gunter’s office. It wasn’t a lot to go on, he
realized. Not after two and a half weeks in Egypt.
“He wasn’t buying jewelry,” Alex insisted. “He
sounded . . . I don’t know . . . mysterious. As if he didn’t
want to be overheard.”
“You’re sure he wasn’t leading you on? Maybe he
wants you to follow him.”
Alex shook his head. “He couldn’t have known I was
listening to him. I was a long way away, on the other side
of the yard.”
“What about the pictures you found in his desk?” Jack
had Alex’s iPhone. She flicked through the images on the
screen.
“I don’t know. We’d better pass them on to Smithers.
He can send them to MI6. Why would anyone take a shot
of a hook on a wall? And what’s this building? Do you
think it’s somewhere in Cairo?”
Jack held up the iPhone. “Nice shot of you,” she said.
“Yes. But if Gunter took it, then it means he knows
who I am.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Why else would he have it? You think he takes pho-
tos of all the new boys?”
They fell silent. Jack had been out in the sun and she
was looking tanned. They both were. It reminded Alex
how long they’d been away.
“What are you going to do about Gunter?”
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“I suppose I’d better follow him.” Alex went on before
she could argue. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t see me, Jack.
But I know that the House of Gold has got something to
do with whatever’s going on. Five o’clock. I can go there
after school.”
“You mean, we can go there after school. That’s why
I’m here, Alex. I’m keeping an eye on you.”
“Thanks, Jack.” Alex gulped down his lemonade. It
was deliciously cold. “I’m really glad you came.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re always
there for me. And you make the best sandwiches.”
Jack smiled. “You’d better get on with your home-
work,” she said. “You don’t want your teachers breathing
down your neck.”
An hour and a half of European history. Alex won-
dered if there were any other secret agents in Cairo being
sent upstairs to do their homework. But he didn’t com-
plain. And an hour later, immersed in the invasion of
France and the evacuation from Dunkirk, he was almost
grateful that he could put everything else out of his mind.
The next day was a Wednesday. It was also the day when
Alex realized that his time at Cairo College was drawing
to a close.
He was having lunch with Andrew and some of the
Scottish boys when one of the seniors came over to their
table. It was unusual for the older boys to mix with the
tenth-graders, but he realized that this one was examin-
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ing him. He looked up into a face that he vaguely recog-
nized: dark, spiky hair, blue eyes, pockmarked cheeks.
“Alex?” the boy said. “You don’t remember me?”
Alex did remember him. But he pretended not to.
“I’m Graham Barnes. I was at Brookland until last year
when my dad got sent out here. You’re Alex Rider, aren’t
you?”
It was the worst coincidence in the world. In their first
term at Brookland, new boys were paired up with older
students, more or less the same system that they had
here. Alex had been looked after—quite well—by Gra-
ham. There was no point denying who he was.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s me.”
“Rider?” Andrew made a face. “I thought your name
was Tanner.”
“My mother remarried.” It was the first thing Alex
could think of to say. “Before she died,” he added weakly.
“Yeah. Well, it’s good to see you.” Graham nodded
at the other kids. “I’ll see you around.”
The rest of them went on talking as they had before,
but Alex noticed Andrew glancing at him once or twice
and knew that he had been found out. He might not know
the reason, but he knew that Alex had lied. It was like the
seed of a poisonous plant . . . and very quickly it would
start to grow.
The day seemed to last forever as far as Alex was con-
cerned, but finally three thirty came and the end of school.
The usual fleet of buses arrived, clumsily maneuvering
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around each other in the space outside the main gates.
Most of the school left on foot and Alex was among them.
He noticed that Andrew avoided him. And maybe he had
spoken to Craig and Simon, because even they left him
alone.
He was glad to see Jack, who was waiting for him with
a black-and-white cab. “Are you sure about this?” she
asked.
Alex nodded. He was more sure of it than ever. “Let’s
go,” he said.
The two of them got in and Jack leaned forward and
gave the driver his instructions. She had printed up the
home page for the House of Gold and the address was
there in Arabic as well as English. She also made sure that
the meter was actually running. It was a common trick
for the Cairo drivers to leave it off and then to charge
double the right price when they arrived.
The traffic in Cairo was as bad as ever, the air full of
exhaust fumes and bad-tempered beeping. By the time
the driver dropped them outside a smart hotel and next
to the river, Alex and Jack were grateful to get out. Jack
had brought Alex a change of clothes and he had wriggled
into them on the backseat. When he got out, he was
wearing a T-shirt, khaki knee-length shorts, and sandals.
Jack took care of his uniform. Dressed in two shades of
blue, he would have stood out at twenty paces.
It was only now that they saw that the House of Gold
wasn’t a house at all. It was an old paddle steamer, like
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something out of another age, permanently moored on
the sluggish brown water of the Nile. The boat was three
levels high, painted white, with two huge paddles at the
back and a single funnel close to the bow. At some time
it had been converted into a gaggle of jewelry shops, each
one built into the old cabins and staterooms. A gangplank
led up from the quay. Its name was written in gold over
the entrance on the main deck.
“What now?” Jack asked.
“We wait,” Alex said.
They found a little park with trees shading them from
the sun and sat down on a wooden bench, tucked out of
sight. From here they could see everyone entering or
leaving the boat. Alex looked at his watch. It was five to
five.
“I should come with you,” Jack said.
“No. It’s better if you stay here. If anything happens,
you can call for help.”
If anything happens. Three small words. But Alex knew
how easily they could tear his life apart.
And then another taxi drew up and Erik Gunter got
out. He had on the same black suit that he wore at school
with a small backpack on his shoulder. He paid the driver,
then made his way over the gangplank and onto the ship.
Alex didn’t hesitate. He was already on his feet, following,
leaving Jack behind. And with all his attention focused on
the head of security, he didn’t notice the gray Chevrolet
that had been parked in the street, on the other side of the
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park. Nor did he see the two men who had been sitting
inside it, watching the paddle steamer just like him. But
they saw him.
“Hey—that kid. Quickly. Get his picture.” The man
spoke with an American accent.
“Why? What do you—?”
“Just do it.”
The second man raised a Nikon D3 digital camera and
pressed the button, capturing Alex as he reached the
gangplank, as he stepped on it, as he began to climb.
“What are you interested in a kid for?” he demanded
sourly.
“I know who that kid is,” the first man replied. “And
you’d better get ready. It looks like we’ve got trouble.”
Erik Gunter made his way through the House of Gold,
squeezing through the tourists and local visitors who
crowded out the narrow passages. There were shops and
stalls on both sides of him with jewelers standing outside,
some of them wearing the dark red Egyptian fez, like
magicians about to do card tricks. There was jewelry ev-
erywhere: the same necklaces and brooches that hung in
every souk in Cairo. Little pyramids on chains, Egyptian
hieroglyphics, lucky cats, scarabs, portraits of Queen
Nefertiti and King Tutankhamen . . . thousands and thou-
sands of different pieces on sale, all of them overpriced,
half of them fake.
Gunter stopped beside one of the stalls. Immediately
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the owner, a fat little man, was onto him. “What you
want? I show you the best. I make you the best price.”
But Gunter ignored him. There was a mirror on the coun-
ter and he reached out and tilted it, as if examining him-
self. But in fact he was looking back the way he’d come,
over his own shoulder. And there he was, skulking in the
doorway of an antiques shop about fifteen yards behind
him . . . Alex Rider. Gunter almost smiled to himself. It
was just as he had said. This fifteen-year-old whiz kid
from British intelligence wasn’t quite so smart after all.
The trap was set. Everything was in its right place.
Now all he had to do was finish it.
He continued forward until he arrived at a doorway
with a CLOSED sign—the one place on the paddle steamer
that wasn’t ready for business. He rang a bell and waited.
There was a buzz and the door clicked open. He paused
for a moment, then went in.
The shop sold antique weapons. There were hundreds
of them, spread out on shelves and in glass cases, hang-
ing from the walls on hooks. Gunter ran his eye over
swords and sabers, flintlock pistols, old army rifles and
muskets, daggers with huge jewels set in the hilts. It was
an interesting collision, he thought. Beauty and death. All
these weapons had once been used by armies or nomadic
tribes. The blades had severed flesh and bone. The guns
would have cut down men, women, and children, sending
them crashing into the sand. And now they were being
sold as ornaments to hang in people’s houses. Gunter
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wouldn’t have been able to live with them. He knew too
well the truth about the pain that these things brought.
An old man, an Egyptian, had appeared behind the
counter: round glasses, thin face, an old-fashioned wing
collar and tie. The man hadn’t shaved. Gray hair had
spread over his chin and his cheeks as if they were dis-
eased. He had thin lips and bad teeth. And finally there
were his fingers, long and very precise—like those of a
pianist. This was a man who had spent his whole life work-
ing with his hands.
“Mr. Habib?” Gunter asked.
“That is my name.” He spoke perfect English.
“I’m Erik Gunter. I think you were expecting me.” The
old man didn’t move. Gunter reached into his pocket and
placed a small metal object on the counter. It was a silver
scorpion.
The old man nodded slowly. “I was indeed expecting
you,” he said.
“Do you have it?”
“Of course.”
The man called Habib reached below the counter and
produced another gun. But there was nothing antique
about this one. It was an L96A1 Arctic Warfare sniper
rifle, gleaming and deadly, a perfectly machined and bal-
anced piece of equipment. He laid it out for Gunter to
examine. “I have made all the adjustments as requested,”
he said. “Particularly to the trigger and to the static iron
sights.”
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“What about the ammo?”
“I will be supplying you with fifty 8.59-millimeter bul-
lets. The gun has a ten-round box magazine.”
“Can it be traced?”
Habib looked pained. “I do not ask you foolish ques-
tions, Mr. Gunter. I do not ask you why you require a
piece of killing machinery as finely crafted as this. I would
suggest you do the same.”
“I apologize, Mr. Habib,” Gunter said, and, reaching
behind him, drew a pistol out from the waistband of his
trousers and shot the Egyptian once in the middle of his
head. There had been almost no sound. The pistol was
silenced. The Egyptian stared as if he couldn’t quite be-
lieve what had happened, then slumped forward. Gunter
snatched the rifle away. He didn’t want it to be contami-
nated by the rapidly spreading pool of blood.
Moving quickly, he went behind the counter and
found what he was looking for: a golf bag, big enough to
hold the rifle. He took a cloth out of his backpack and
wiped the barrel clean. This was the only part of the gun
he had touched and he wasn’t going to leave fingerprints.
Using the cloth, he lowered the L96A1 into the bag and
zipped it shut. Finally, he reached into the backpack and
found a cumbersome package with several wires and a
switch. He flicked the switch, closed the backpack, and
stuffed it behind the counter. He took one last look
around. Then he left, satisfied with what he had done.
In his haste, he didn’t quite close the door.
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• • •
Alex Rider saw him go past. He noticed that Gunter had
swapped the backpack for what looked like a golf bag.
For a moment, the two of them were almost next to each
other. Alex was inside one of the stalls, pretending to ex-
amine a mother-of-pearl jewelry box. He glanced back as
Gunter disappeared, then stepped out into the corridor.
The obvious thing would be to follow the head of secu-
rity. That was what Gunter seemed to be inviting. But
then he noticed that the door of the shop was ajar.
He took out his iPhone and texted Jack, Gunter leav-
ing. follow him. will meet later. That was him taken care of.
Now to see whom he had met and perhaps what he had
been given.
Alex made his way down the corridor, pushing through
the crowds. The House of Gold had an air-conditioning
system, but even so, it felt hot and sticky. A couple of
salesmen waved gold necklaces at him, but he ignored
them. He reached the door and gently pushed it open. It
took his eyes a few moments to get used to the gloom.
His eyes swept over all the weapons. The place was like a
medieval arsenal. Then he saw the man lying with the top
part of his body on the counter and his arms spread out
protectively around him. He could have been asleep, but
Alex knew instantly that he wasn’t. And it wasn’t a red
cushion beneath his head. He could smell the blood in the
sluggish air.
He backed out fast. He knew that he had finally ar-
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rived at the heart of the conspiracy. Gunter had just killed
this man and it was easy enough to guess what he must
have been carrying in the golf bag. But still it made no
sense. Was he acting alone or was he part of a larger or-
ganization? And what was the connection with Cairo
College? Despite everything, this trail had led him no-
where. He still had no idea what was going on.
Alex was feeling sick. He just wanted to get back into
the open air, and he wished now that he hadn’t sent the
instruction to Jack. Gunter was a killer. If Jack got too
close, she could be in danger. He would call her again,
the moment he was out. But for now he was fighting his
way back down the corridor. The gold and silver jewelry
seemed to hammer at him from every direction. He was
almost suffocating.
And then there was an explosion. Alex was blown off
his feet and he felt the entire paddle steamer tilt violently
to one side. All around him, people began to scream,
thrown off balance. Gold chains, ornaments, and brass
plates came raining down. At the same time, a plume of
black smoke came surging through the corridor, instantly
wiping out his vision. He could hardly breathe. All the
electric lights had gone off.
Somebody fell on top of him. He pushed them off and
crawled on his hands and knees. The paddle steamer
rocked back again—it was like being on some hideous
fairground ride. The crowds were still screaming. And
then there was a gushing sound and Alex felt water—
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warm and evil-smelling—surge around his hands and
knees. God! Erik Gunter—or someone working with
him—had blown a hole in the side of the paddle steamer
and it was sinking. If he didn’t get out, he would go down
with it.
Everyone else had had the same idea. The jewelers
were stuffing necklaces and chains into their pockets,
saving what they could. They had forgotten that once
they were in the water it would only drag them down. The
floor moved again, slanting backward, and Alex found
himself clawing his way uphill. There were people every-
where, all around him. He drew up next to a sobbing
Egyptian girl—she couldn’t have been more than six
years old. She was on her own. He reached out and put
an arm around her, drawing her with him. Behind him,
he heard the sound of shattering glass. One of the coun-
ters had come loose, rolled down the deck and into the
wall. Gold coins and medals exploded out of it.
The girl was snatched away. Her father or uncle had
found her and took her without a word of thanks. Alex
could see the exit in front of him, a rectangle of light that
slanted heavily to one side. He climbed toward it, drag-
ging himself up with his hands. A minute later, he was out
on the deck, sucking in the air, still tasting the smoke.
The gangplank had fallen away. The paddle steamer was
jammed into the side of the quay as if it had just crashed
into it. Alex saw that the thick ropes that had kept it
moored were preventing it from sinking altogether, al-
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though they were already straining and would surely snap
at any moment. People were hurling themselves over the
side. Some of them preferred the river to the hard fall
with solid concrete below. Alex decided to join them. He
was already soaking wet. There was no point in risking a
broken leg.
He slid down the deck and dived into the murky water
of the Nile. He vaguely wondered what germs he was
exposing himself to. They would probably kill him faster
than the bomb. He broke surface and swam toward the
quay, making his way through the pieces of debris that
floated all over the surface. At the same time he noticed
half-naked Egyptian boys diving off the edge, into the
water. They weren’t trying to help anyone. They were
scavengers, looking for anything of value that might actu-
ally float.
Jack, of course, was gone. How would he contact her
now? His iPhone would be ruined. Alex reached the side
of the quay and pulled himself out. He examined himself.
At least he hadn’t been hurt. But he was filthy and bat-
tered by the force of the blast. He could taste the Nile
water on his lips and wondered how many millions of
germs he had managed to swallow. The bomb hadn’t
killed him. The river quite possibly might.
He crossed the quay, making for the park where he
and Jack had waited. He guessed that as soon as she had
heard what had happened, she would make her way back
to the same spot. He found the bench and sat down heav-
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ily. All around him, people were milling past, many of
them dripping wet. There were white-suited police
officers everywhere, already taking command, blowing
whistles and shouting out orders. Of course, the police
were everywhere in Cairo. They would have spent
months training for an event just like this. Alex shook his
head. How could this have happened? It was the last
thing he had expected.
And then there was a man standing in front of him.
Alex looked up.
“Come with me,” the man said.
“What?”
The man opened his jacket, showing a gun in a holster
under his arm. “You heard what I said.”
A second man had crept up behind him and dragged
him to his feet. Both of them were in their thirties, clean
shaven, with sunglasses. The man with the gun had
spoken with an American accent.
“We have a car. We’re going to walk you there. If you
do anything, we’ll shoot.”
Alex didn’t doubt them. There was a seriousness about
them, a sense that they knew exactly what they were
doing. This was something they had done before. One
man stood in front of him. The other was right behind.
Alex felt himself being lifted up and frog-marched into
the road. There was a gray Chevrolet parked right in front
of him. For a brief moment he considered a countermove.
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Right now, before it was too late, jabbing with an elbow,
then swinging around to kick out.
But the man had been expecting it. Suddenly his arm
was seized and twisted behind his back. “Don’t even
think of it,” he said.
Alex was bundled in. He was facedown on the back-
seat of the Chevrolet. The door slammed. Both men had
gotten into the front.
The road was clogged up with traffic but the car
swerved around, performing a U-turn. And then they
were clear, picking up speed, leaving the dead man and
the wreckage of the House of Gold far behind.
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THEY DROVE FOR FORTY MINUTES, heading for one of
the many suburbs that were hardly separate from the city
itself. That was the thing about Cairo. It was almost im-
possible to say where one area ended and the next began.
If ever a city could be described as sprawling, this was it.
Alex tried to work out where they were going but soon
gave up. He was lying on the backseat with his head fac-
ing the floor. This was what the two men had instructed.
For the first part of the journey, he did what he was told,
feeling, as the car lurched left and right, like a rat caught
in a maze. But the farther they went from the House of
Gold, the more the two men relaxed, and he was able to
twist around so that at least he had a partial view out of
the window. Most of what he saw was sky, but a few
landmarks flashed by—the hideous modern construction
that was the Cairo Tower, the American university, the
minaret of one of the main mosques. Alex made a note of
them. Later on, it might help to work out where he had
been taken.
He had been dripping wet when the journey began,
but somehow—a combination of the heat and the air-
conditioning—he dried out a little as they continued.
Eventually, the driver signaled and the car began to slow
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down. Alex guessed they had arrived and he tried to sit
up, determined to see where they were.
He was pushed down immediately. But in that one
brief second he was just able to see an old-fashioned,
possibly abandoned office block and a sign that read
Cairo International Authority before they turned off
the road and drove down a ramp leading underneath the
building. The International Authority? Alex wondered
what he had gotten himself into. Why should a local
group have
any interest in him?
The car stopped. There was a third man waiting for
them. The back door was thrown open and Alex was
dragged out. He found himself standing in a drab under-
ground garage illuminated by strip lights that threw a
hard white gloss over the concrete walls and floors. One
of the lights was malfunctioning, buzzing and flickering.
It made the place more nightmarish than it already was.
There were about a dozen other cars already parked but
no other drivers. Alex was alone with three dangerous
men. Their hostility bristled in the air.
For the moment none of them spoke, and Alex was
able to examine them for the first time. They were all of
a type, about the same age, all in dark suits and white ties.
They reminded Alex of the sort of people who went
around towns knocking on doors, trying to convert you
to some religion. The man who had first approached
him—and who seemed to be in charge—was built like an
American football player with huge shoulders and a thick
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neck. He had a small, upturned nose, fair hair cut like a
nail brush, and watery blue eyes. His partner was
similarly built, fit, possibly ex-army. His hair was dark,
and he was obviously mixed race . . . Native American,
maybe. The third man, the one who had been waiting,
was black, angry looking, smaller, and lighter on his feet
than the others. He was looking at Alex with disbelief.
“Is this him?” he demanded.
“Yeah.” The fair-haired man nodded.
“What about Habib?”
“Habib is probably dead. The boat blew up.”
“What?”
“You heard what I said, Franklin. Right now, the
House of Gold is on the bottom of the Nile. And this kid
was there—”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Alex said.
“Shut up!” Fair Hair snapped out the two words.
“What are we going to do with him, Lewinsky?”
Franklin, the black man, asked.
“We’re going to take him to the bell room.”
“Whoa!” The driver was unhappy. “We can’t do that!”
“We don’t have time to talk about this,” Lewinsky
snarled. “And we’re not going to talk about it in front of
him. We need answers to questions and we need them
now. So let’s take him down and get on with it.”
Down? They were already in the basement. Alex didn’t
like the sound of this, the way things were going.
“You’re making a mistake,” he began.
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“Save your breath,” Lewinsky said. “You’re going to
need it.”
Alex felt a hand shove him in the back and he was
propelled toward an elevator. The driver pressed the but-
ton and the doors slid open at once. The elevator was a
steel box. It was like walking into a refrigerator. The four
of them bundled in and they were carried down. Alex was
trying to quell a rising sense of panic. Too much had
hap
pened in the past hour—the discovery of the dead
man, the explosion, the way he had been kidnapped in
broad daylight. He had no idea who these people were or
what they wanted. And what was the bell room?
But more than anything, he was desperately worried
about Jack. He had sent her chasing after Erik Gunter.
Right now, he needed to warn her about what he had
seen on the boat. She needed to know the danger she was
in. And it might well be that she had heard about the ex-
plosion. If so, she would be sick with worry herself. The
least he could do was tell her he was still alive.
“I want to talk to Jack,” Alex said.
“Who’s Jack?” Lewinsky asked.
“She’s a friend. She looks after me.”
“What? You mean she’s like your nanny?”
Alex ignored the taunt. “I have her mobile number.”
There was no response. “I just want to let her know that
I’m okay,” he said.
Lewinsky smiled unpleasantly. “What makes you think
you’re okay?”
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They had traveled some distance underground. Alex
could feel it in his stomach and in the sense of weight
pressing on his shoulders. The doors of the elevator slid
open to reveal a short, windowless corridor leading to a
single wooden door at the end. Somehow Alex knew he
didn’t want to find out what was on the other side. But he
had no choice. Franklin and the unnamed man had al-
ready left the elevator. Lewinsky laid a heavy hand on his
shoulder and propelled him forward.
He walked down the corridor with a sense of dread, a
long shadow stretching ahead of him. Franklin opened
the door. It led into a large room that was indeed shaped
like the inside of a bell, round with bare brick walls that
narrowed as they rose at least two floors above his head.
Alex didn’t like anything he saw. The room had no win-
dows and was lit by a single bulb dangling on a wire. The
door was soundproofed. The floor was covered with a
thick rubber mat. In the middle there was a wooden chair
and to one side a narrow table that had been constructed
so that one end sloped downward. The table had three
leather belts and Alex could see at once that they were
meant for him: one for his ankles, one for his stomach,
one for his shoulders and arms. There was a bucket and
a tap. The room had been designed for one purpose.
There was no escaping it. It screamed at him everywhere
he looked.
“Take a seat.” Lewinsky gestured at the chair.
“I’m okay standing.”
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“You want to quit wisecracking and do as you’re told?
I can make this much, much worse for you.”
“Why don’t you tell me who you are?”
Franklin and the other man exchanged a look, but Le-
winsky didn’t blink. “You’re the one who’s going to an-
swer the questions,” he said. “Now sit down!”
Alex went over to the chair. He sat down and watched
with a mixture of curiosity and disgust as Lewinsky
leaned down and pulled off Alex’s damp socks and shoes.
Meanwhile, Franklin closed the door. Lewinsky straight-
ened up and stood in front of him. Alex’s clothes were
sticking to him. His bare feet dangled over the floor.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said. “What were you
doing at the House of Gold?”
“What do you think I was doing?” Alex replied. “I’m
a schoolboy. I go to the Cairo College of Arts and Educa-
tion. You can call them if you don’t believe me. I was
buying a present for my teacher.”
“Right—let’s get one thing straight and cut this out,”
Lewinsky interrupted. “I know exactly who you are.
You’re not a schoolboy . . . or at least, you may be. But
you’re also a spy working for the British secret service.
Your name is Alex Rider. So let me ask you again. What
are you doing here in Cairo? Why were you on that boat?”
Alex’s head spun. He wasn’t quite sure how to re-
spond. These people knew who he was. But how? Cairo
International Authority. Who were they?
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“Look . . . I don’t know who you people are or what
you want,” Alex said. “But I’ve got nothing to tell you.”
He sighed. There didn’t seem any point holding informa-
tion back. They would beat it out of him anyway. And
why should he suffer in silence to protect MI6? It wasn’t
as if he had chosen to work for them. “I was following
someone,” he said. “A man named Erik Gunter. He’s the
head of security at the Cairo International College of Arts
and Education.”
“Why were you following him?”
“To see where he went!” Alex couldn’t resist the an-
swer but immediately regretted it, seeing Lewinsky’s face
darken. “There’s a possible threat against the school,” he
went on. “I thought Gunter might be part of it. I heard
him talking on the phone and he led me to the House of
Gold.”
“And then?”
“He went into a shop. It was full of old weapons. I
went in after him and there was a dead man there. I think
Gunter must have shot him.”
“Describe this dead man.”
Alex did the best he could. “He was old. He had gray
hair. To be honest with you, I didn’t look at him that
closely. There was a lot of blood.”
“Habib,” Franklin muttered. “Habib’s dead?” “That’s
right. I saw the body and I left the room,
and about ten seconds later the whole ship blew up.
That’s all I know—and if you want to interrogate anyone,
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you should be looking for Gunter. I can give you his ad-
dress if you like. It might stop you from wasting your time
with me.”
Lewinsky considered for a moment. Alex could almost
see the thought processes unwinding behind his eyes. At
last he came to a conclusion and Alex knew at once that
it was the wrong one. “You’re working for MI6,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Why are you in Cairo?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Suddenly Alex had had enough. “Then why don’t you
go and
——
yourself.” He spat out the swearword.
“What’s the point in asking me questions if you don’t
believe the answers?”
“You can make us believe you.”
“And how do I do that?”
Lewinsky must have given a signal. The other two
men grabbed hold of Alex and pulled him to his feet.
There was nothing he could do. They were much stron-
ger than him. The two of them hauled him over to the
table and forced him down on his back. Then, while
Franklin held him, the man with no name tied his ankles,
arms, and chest, drawing the belts tight. When they
stepped back, Alex couldn’t move. He was lying at a slant
with his bare feet slightly above his head. Meanwhile, Le-
winsky had filled the bucket with water from the tap. It
was the last thing Alex saw. A moment later, a black hood
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was drawn over his head, blocking his sight and much of
his air.
And with a surge of panic that he couldn’t hold back,
Alex knew what they were going to do. He knew what this
was called. Waterboarding. It was a method of torture
that American soldiers had supposedly used in Guantá-
namo Bay, one that they favored because it left no bruises
or signs of injury. And yet it was horribly effective. Alex
had read somewhere that a grown man was unlikely to
last more than fourteen seconds before he begged to tell
his inquisitors everything.
Effectively, they were going to drown him.
“I want to know why you’re here and what really hap-
pened on that boat.” Lewinsky’s voice was muffled. It
came out of nowhere.
“I’ve told you!” Alex shouted through the cloth.
“You haven’t told me anything. But you will . . .”
Alex felt the extra weight as a towel was laid across his
face. Desperately he shook his head from side to side,
trying to throw it off, but then two hands clamped down
on him, holding him still. Alex’s hands curled. All the
muscles in his legs and abdomen loosened as sheer terror
took control. And then the first drops of water were
poured onto the towel. He felt the dampness against his
face and then, immediately afterward, the first symptoms
of
suffocation. He couldn’t breathe. Worse than that. His
lungs were tearing themselves apart, his whole body try-
ing to swallow itself. He was going mad.
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“What the hell is going on in here? What do you think
you’re doing?”
It was a new voice, coming from somewhere miles
away. Alex tried to scream. No sound came out. He hon-
estly thought he was about to die.
“Get that thing off him!”
There was a hand scrabbling at his face. The towel had
gone. The mask was torn off and light and air hit him at the
same time. Alex was gasping. His mouth was wide open.
He knew he wouldn’t have been able to survive a second
more.
A man loomed over him, and at that moment Alex
knew exactly where he was and who these people were.
He would almost have laughed if he hadn’t still been in
shock. Of course he should have recognized the sign. In
Miami, they had been Centurion International Advertis-
ing. In New York it was Creative Ideas Animation. And
here—Cairo International Authority. Always the same
initials. CIA. The man’s name was Joe Byrne. He was
black, in his sixties, with white hair and the earnest,
caring face of a family doctor about to give bad news. Alex
had met with him twice before and, despite everything,
knew him as a decent man, one who was usually on his
side.
“Alex, I don’t know what to say,” Byrne exclaimed. The
belts had already been untied and Alex had been helped
to sit upright. “I only just heard what was going on.”
“Sir—,” Lewinsky began.
“Save it for the court-martial, Lewinsky,” Byrne
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snapped. “God in heaven! What did you three think you
were doing? This is a kid!”
“He’s a British spy!” Lewinsky insisted.
“He’s on our side. He’s helped us on two separate
occasions. If it wasn’t for Alex Rider, Washington, DC,
would no longer be there. Get out of here! I don’t want to
see you right now. I’ll talk to you later!” The three men left.
Byrne turned back to Alex. “Are you feeling strong
enough to get out of here?” he asked. “Or do you need
more time?”
“I’m fine.” Alex was still in shock, but he slid himself
off the table and picked up his shoes and socks.
Byrne waited until he’d put them on. “Let’s get some
coffee in my office,” he suggested.
He led Alex out of the bell room and back to the eleva-
tor. This time they took it up to the ground floor, neither
of them speaking. Alex guessed that Byrne was giving
him a few moments to recover . . . or maybe he was still
fuming with anger himself. This time the doors opened
into a more comfortable area with a reception desk, pot-
ted plants, mirrors, and chandeliers. “We rent this place
from the Egyptian government,” Byrne explained. “Half
of it is pretty run-down, but the rest of it is fine for our
needs. This way . . .”
Byrne’s office was on the same level, with smoked
glass blocking the view outside. Alex remembered his of-
fice in Miami. This one was almost exactly the same, with
fairly standard furniture, a thick-pile carpet, a picture of
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the American president on the wall. The CIA had offices
all over the world and they were probably all identical.
Byrne waved Alex to a seat, then picked up the phone and
ordered two coffees. He sat down himself.
“First of all, I’m sorry about Blake Lewinsky,” Byrne
began. “He’s not actually a bad agent, but this new breed
. . . they’re young and they have no sense of pro- portion.
But this time he went too far. I swear to you, Alex, I’ll
have him sent back to Langley and he’ll end up working
in the canteen!”
“Forget it,” Alex said. “He didn’t hurt me.”
“He would have if I hadn’t arrived in time.” Byrne
sighed. “I’m afraid there are some things I have to ask
you . . .”
“There’s not much I can tell you,” Alex said. “But first
I’d like to call Jack Starbright, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure. Be my guest.”
Byrne handed Alex the phone and he dialed Jack’s
mobile. It rang several times, then went to voice mail.
That worried Alex. There were plenty of areas in Cairo
where it was impossible to get a signal, but he wouldn’t
be able to relax until he had spoken to her. “Jack,” he
said. “It’s me. I’m okay. I’ll meet you back at the apart-
ment.” He didn’t want to add any more with Byrne in the
room. He hung up.
The door opened and a young woman came in with
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two cups of coffee and a plate of cookies. She set them
down and left again.
“You know, Alex, I can’t believe you’re out here,”
Byrne began. “Don’t tell me Alan Blunt persuaded you to
work for him again!”
Alex didn’t answer. He trusted Byrne, but he also felt
uneasy being trapped between two intelligence services.
He would have to be careful what he said.
“So why are you here, Alex?”
“Why don’t you start by telling me what you’re up to?”
Alex replied. “Why were your men watching the House
of Gold? And who is Habib?”
“Did you meet with him?”
“No. One of your men asked me about him. But by the
time I saw him, he was already dead.”
“You didn’t shoot him?” It was impossible to say if
Byrne was joking or not.
“Of course I didn’t.”
Byrne nodded. “I believe you. This whole thing is a
mess. It’s just a miracle that no one from that paddle ship
was killed. Apart from Habib, that is.” He paused. “All
right, Alex. I’ll tell you what’s going on. I guess I owe you
that much. But if you’re involved—you and MI6—I want
to know. Is that a deal?”
“Sure.” Alex helped himself to a coffee.
“Okay. We’re out here because the secretary of state
is arriving this weekend. I don’t know how acquainted
you are with American politics, but our secretary of state
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is like your foreign secretary. You could say she’s number
two after the president . . . In fact, there are a lot of peo-
ple who say she could be the next president. She’s out-
spoken and she’s hard-line but she’s also very popular.
And she’s about to give a speech in Cairo.”
Byrne took his own coffee. He looked uncomfortable
about what he was about to say, unsure whether he
should give away his secrets, but then he made up his
mind and went on. “This is all being hushed up at the
moment, but the speech is all about power. Who are the
big hitters in the world right now? When it comes to talk-
ing about the big issues—nuclear weapons, war, terror-
ism—who should be sitting at the top table? Up to now,
it’s always been the Americans, you British, the Europe-
ans, and so on. But there are new powers in the world.
The Chinese. India. She thinks it’s time to make a few
changes. And—you’re not going to like this, Alex—she
doesn’t think the Brits have a place anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” Alex
said.
“No, of course not. Why should it? But it’s going to
make a lot of your politicians very angry. If you ask me,
the secretary of state is playing politics. It’s coming up to
election time and there’s a lot of anti-British feeling in the
States right now. You remember that big oil spill in the
Gulf of Mexico? And then there was that secret deal with
Libya. A speech like this is going to make all the right
headlines . . . for her. She’s way out of line. Even the
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president has tried to draw her in. But she’s going ahead
anyway.”
“How does Habib fit into this?”
“I’m coming to him. Our job is to protect the secre-
tary of state while she’s in Cairo. It doesn’t matter what
she’s doing or saying. That’s got nothing to do with us.
We’re just here—we’ve been here for two weeks now—to
look after her. And a few days ago we got a tip-off that
somebody might take a shot at her, to prevent her from
making the speech.”
“Habib?”
“That was just one of the names he used. Mostly he
was just known as the Engineer. He sold weapons, Alex.
Very precise, high-caliber weapons such as sniper rifles.
Actually, he’d provide you with anything from a samurai
sword to a hand grenade. But he was a craftsman. Every-
thing he supplied was deadly accurate. Now do you begin
to get the picture? We get a tip-off. We know that the
Engineer is in town, so we start to watch him. And then,
four days before our secretary of state is about to make a
big anti-British speech, a British secret agent turns up
and—boom—there’s an explosion and Habib is dead.”
Byrne slumped in his chair. Maybe it was the heat.
Maybe he was feeling his age.
“I’m not saying that Blake Lewinsky was right, but
perhaps it explains what he almost did to you. Habib was
dead and he needed to know why.”
Alex’s mind was in a whirl. There was so much he had
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237
to take on board. The main question was—how much
should he tell Joe Byrne?
First, Erik Gunter. When he’d left the boat, he’d been
carrying a golf bag, and Alex had no doubt now that it
must have had some sort of weapon inside. Was he here
to assassinate the American secretary of state? And if so,
who was paying him? Then there were the pictures he had
seen in Gunter’s desk. He couldn’t show them to Byrne,
as his iPhone had been destroyed by the Nile water. But
the building, the room, the Washington Post . . . they must
all be connected. And what about Cairo College itself?
That was the reason he had been sent out here. It was the
school, not some American politician, that was meant to
be the target.
He needed to see Smithers. That was the important
thing. Smithers could talk to Blunt and Blunt could talk
to Byrne. Suddenly Alex felt an overwhelming desire to
get out of Cairo. He didn’t understand why, but he didn’t
like the way this was going. Not for the first time, he had
a sense of invisible forces, of wheels within wheels. There
was something happening here in Egypt that none of
them understood.
“There’s not much I can tell you, Mr. Byrne.” Alex
found himself talking before he even knew quite what he
was going to say. “The reason I’m in Cairo has got noth-
ing to do with your secretary of state. I was simply sent
to keep an eye on the Cairo International College of Arts
and Education in Sheikh Fayed City. There’s a possibility
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that some of the students there may be targeted . . . I
don’t know much more than that. I was following their
head of security, a man named Erik Gunter, and he led
me to the House of Gold. I told Lewinsky this, but he
didn’t believe me. Gunter was the last person to see Habib
alive. I think he was the one who killed him, and if I were
you I’d strap him down to your table and see where you
get with the water torture and leave me alone.”
Alex stood up.
“And now I’d like to go home. I’m worried about
Jack.”
Byrne nodded. “And I’d better put a call in to your Mr.
Blunt,” he said. “By the way, I hear he’s on the way out.”
Alex was surprised to hear it. “He’s retiring?”
“Not by choice.” Byrne reached for the telephone. “I’ll
get a car to take you home. Once again, I’m sorry about
what happened.”
A few moments later, the woman who had brought the
coffee came back in and led Alex out to the street. Joe
Byrne stayed where he was, deep in thought. Despite all
the evidence, he had never believed that there was a Brit-
ish plot to kill the secretary of state. Now, after what Alex
had told him, he wondered if he should change his mind.
For a start, there needed to be round-the-clock surveil-
lance on this man Gunter. He would also raise the secu-
rity to level red and order another search of the Assembly
Hall, where the speech was taking place. It had been
searched twice already and on Saturday night, twenty-
T h e
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239
four hours before the secretary of state arrived, it would
be locked down completely.
The Assembly Hall. A huge domed building sur-
rounded by palm trees in the middle of the University of
Cairo. How could he ever hope to make such a place
completely safe?
And what of Alex Rider? With a bit of luck, he’d be on
the next plane back to England. Safely out of the picture.
In fact, if the boy had had any sense, he would never have
come at all.
15
P L A N A .
.
.
P L A N B
JACK WAS WAITING FOR ALEX when he got back to
Golden Palm Heights. In fact, she was out and running
toward him before the CIA driver had even come to a
halt. She half dragged him out of the car and into her
embrace. “Alex? What happened to you? I’ve been so
worried.” She pulled away from him. “Your clothes are
all damp!”
“Yes. I took a dip in the Nile.”
“You were on the boat when—?” She didn’t want to
put it into words. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw what
had happened. For a minute I thought . . . Well, I didn’t
know what to think. But then I got your message.”
The car with the CIA man moved off.
Jack noticed it as if for the first time. “Who was that?”
she asked.
“It’s a long story, Jack. If you don’t mind, I’m going to
have a shower and get changed first. I stink. And I don’t
suppose you’ve got anything for supper? I’m starving.”
A short while later, Alex and Jack sat down to eat to-
gether on the balcony, allowing the warmth of the eve-
ning to wash over them. The sun hadn’t set yet but it was
dipping behind the buildings, throwing soft shadows over
the estate. The pool was empty. Alex knew that Craig and
P l a n
A
. . .
P l a n
B
241
Simon and all the others would be inside by now, slumped
over their homework. He wished that he had so little to
worry about.
Alex had changed into a baggy T-shirt and shorts. His
hair was still wet from the shower and there was a ban-
dage on his knee. He wasn’t even sure when he’d
scratched himself, but Jack had noticed it at once and had
insisted on rubbing in half a tube of antiseptic cream. He
had, after all, taken a dip in the Nile. It reminded Alex of
all the times she had looked after him in the past. Some
things never changed.
She had prepared an assortment of Egyptian dishes:
hummus, olives, stuffed grape leaves, fried meatballs, and
smoked aubergine—all served with warm aish baladi, or
Egyptian flat bread. She was drinking chilled pink
lemonade . Alex stuck to water.
“I was sitting outside the House of Gold, wondering
what was going on, when I got your text,” she said. “I
didn’t like the idea of leaving you, but I waited for Gunter
to come out and I followed him like you told me to. He
looked like he was going to play golf or something. He
had a golf bag.”
“I know.”
“Well, he flagged down a taxi and I managed to get
one just behind him. It was like being in a film. I followed
him all the way across Cairo and I thought he might be
going somewhere exciting, but in the end he went into an
apartment just around the corner from here. I made a
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
note of the address. I think it’s where he lives. Anyway,
after that I wasn’t sure what to do, but I was worried
about you, so I went all the way back to the House of Gold
. . . except that it wasn’t there anymore. There were police
everywhere and they were talking about attack or
something. My first thought was to call Mr. Smithers, but
when I took out my mobile I saw that you’d called. I got
your message and came back here.”
She poured herself another glass of lemonade. “Now
it’s your turn. What happened on the boat? How did you
escape? And who was the man in the car?”
Quickly, Alex told her about his own ordeal, starting
with the dead man in the antiques shop, the explosion, his
capture by the CIA, and the bell room. He left out the
waterboarding. He didn’t really want to relive the experi-
ence and he knew Jack would have been sickened. “That
was a CIA car that brought me here,” he concluded. “At
least they were decent enough to give me a lift.”
Jack shook her head. “This is absolutely typical of Mr.
Blunt,” she said. “He promised us there wouldn’t be any
danger, but we’ve already got dead bodies on boats,
bombs, and political assassination. So what are we going
to do?”
The question had been hanging in the air since he got
back, and Alex had already been considering the answer.
“I think it’s time to do what Mr. Byrne suggested,” he
said. “We ought to leave.”
“Back to England?”
P l a n A . . . P l a n B
243
“I suppose so.” Alex had eaten enough. He put down
his knife and fork and leaned back contentedly. In the
distance he could hear insects of some sort—cicadas—
that had already started up in the undergrowth. “I still
don’t know what’s going on here, Jack,” he said. “And my
cover’s been blown. There’s a boy here from Brookland
who recognized me, and it can’t be long before people
start asking questions. It’s all getting out of hand and I
don’t want to be part of it.”
“Do you think the school’s under threat?”
“If I thought that, I’d stay. Cairo College is okay . . .
even Miss Watson. But I’ve been there for almost three
weeks and it all seems completely ordinary. The only rea-
son we think it might be a target is because Mr. Blunt told
us—and you’re right, we can’t believe a word he says.
Anyway, after what happened today, it seems almost cer-
tain that he’s wrong.”
Alex went over it all in his head once again. But he
couldn’t see any other possibility.
“Erik Gunter must be involved with this visit,” he said.
“The American secretary of state. He’d been to see this
big weapons dealer and that bag he was carrying ”
“It wasn’t golf clubs.”
“Exactly. Maybe he’s a hired assassin. Maybe he’s
using his position at the school as some sort of cover. But
the CIA is going to be watching him from now on. It’s got
nothing to do with the school and it’s got nothing to do
with me. So I might as well go.”
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
Jack nodded. “Are you going to tell Mr. Smithers?”
“Yes. I’ll go and see him tomorrow while you’re doing
the packing. You’d better also call the school and tell
them I’m not well or something.” Alex felt a little sad
about that. He’d have liked to have said good-bye to some
of the friends he’d made. But he knew it was better not
to. There would have been too much to explain. “We can
get a flight tomorrow afternoon.”
“I agree with you,” Jack said. She lifted her glass of
and swirled it in front of her. “But there’s just one
problem. I’m not sure England’s going to be safe for you,
Alex. Remember how this all started. Someone tried to
kill you.”
Alex knew that she was right. “Where, then?” he asked.
“Well, I’ve been thinking. It’s probably a crazy idea
and you don’t have to make a decision. But I was won-
dering if you wouldn’t be happier in America.”
“America?”
Jack nodded. “It’s just a thought, Alex. You might be
safer there . . . in every sense. Away from Alan Blunt and
Mrs. Jones. You could start a new life, maybe in Washing-
ton. You know I’ve got family there.” She paused. “The
funny thing is, I was going to talk to you about it before
all this began.”
“You want to go home?”
“I wouldn’t go without you.”
“I don’t know, Jack. I really don’t.” Alex tried to imag-
ine leaving Brookland School behind him, all his friends,
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245
the house in Chelsea. And would MI6 leave him alone,
even if he was on the other side of the world? “London’s
got to be safer than it is here. Let’s go home and see how
things work out.”
“Sure.” Jack smiled. “Two business-class tickets to
Heathrow. We might as well travel in style—and I can
always get MI6 to pay. The important thing is that we’re
leaving Cairo. Are you certain you don’t want me to come
with you to see Mr. Smithers?”
“No. I’ll be all right.”
“You won’t let him change your mind?”
“I don’t think he’ll even try. I’ve always had the feeling
that he’s on my side.”
“Well, that sounds like a plan.” Jack lifted her glass.
“So the toast is—home!”
Alex raised his own. “Home!”
The two of them clinked glasses in the setting sun.
Night comes slowly in the Sahara Desert.
By eight o’clock, the sands were burning a deep yel-
low and the shadows from the olive trees were stretching
out as if trying to escape from the trunks that bound
them. But the sun was still there, sitting on the horizon,
and the heat of the day was only beginning to retreat. The
salt lakes were like sheets of steel, utterly still. There
didn’t seem to be a breath of wind.
The crack of the bullet tore through the great silence,
splitting the very air. Seventy yards away from the tip of
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
the rifle, a black-and-white photograph of Alex Rider
shuddered briefly, pinned to a wooden stake that had
been driven into the sand. It was a perfect shot. A round
hole appeared where his right eye had once been, the last
in a row of five that snaked across his forehead. Lying on
his stomach, Julius Grief lowered the sniper rifle—the
Arctic Warfare L96A1 that had been brought to him from
Cairo. It was a beautiful weapon, he thought. He couldn’t
wait to use it for real.
In the distance he heard soft applause. Razim was
standing on the parapet of the old French fort, wearing a
freshly laundered, very white dishdasha.
“Come inside, Julius,” he called out. “We’re about to
turn on the night defenses and I wouldn’t want to see you
being blown apart.”
Julius stood up, brushing sand off his chest and thighs.
He was wearing loose-fitting shorts and a striped shirt
with the sleeves rolled up. His hair had been cut a little
shorter since his escape from the Gibraltar prison. He
was also thickly smeared with sunscreen . . . He burned
easily and it was important that his appearance remain
the same.
He had been brought by ship from Gibraltar, all the
way around the northern tip of Africa to the resort town
of Marsa Matruh, and then driven south to Siwa. He had
been at the fort for two weeks, almost exactly the same
time that Alex had spent at the Cairo International Col-
lege of Arts and Education. Razim had been keeping a
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247
close watch on him. The entire world thought he was
dead and it was vital that things stay that way. Of course,
Julius had complained. It was as if he had been trans-
ferred from one prison to another, and in the end Razim
had allowed him to visit Cairo with the promise that he
would wear a baseball cap and dark glasses to conceal his
identity and that he would stay well clear of Alex Rider.
Razim had been furious to learn that Julius had dis-
obeyed his instructions. So far, however, he hadn’t men-
tioned it.
Julius passed through the main entrance and heard
the whir of machinery as the solid wooden and steel gates
swung shut behind him. He knew that miniature land
mines, buried in the sand, would have been activated all
around the fort. A few nights ago, a stray desert fox had
tried to approach the compound, scavenging for food.
They had all been woken up as the unfortunate animal
had been blown apart.
Drinks had been served on the terrace outside the
house where Razim lived. This was a neat, very square-
cut building with two floors. In fact, it could have been
drawn by a child. It had a front door and five shuttered
windows, one on each side and three above, positioned
with perfect symmetry. Wooden rods carved from palm
trunks jutted out of the side of the house just below the
tiled roof. It was part of the Berber tradition. Local tribes-
men would have hung bones—animal and human—from
the rods to keep away devils. But looking at the two
people
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who had come together to watch the sun set, they might
have decided that it was already too late?
Razim had a tall glass with Coca Cola, ice, and lemon
in front of him and, Julius Grief sat down opposite him,
resting the gun against the table. He raised a hand and
one of Razim’s men hurried over with a soda.
“That was excellent shooting,” Razim said.
“My father trained me,” Julius replied. “He trained all
of us. And every time we missed, we got three strokes of
the cane. By the end of it, we were all pretty good shots.”
“He was a remarkable man.”
“He was brilliant.” Julius drank some of his soda.
“You know, they say it’s impossible to clone a human
being. Well, he managed it. In fact, he did it sixteen times.”
“And the plastic surgery?”
“That was done by some doctor he found. A man
named Baxter.”
“It must have been very disappointing for you to find
you had been given the wrong face.”
“You have no idea.” Julius’s hand tightened on his
glass. “It wasn’t just that. I’d spent months learning about
David and Caroline Friend. They were stinking rich . . .
They owned supermarkets and art galleries and stuff.
And I was going to move in as their son and take it all
from them. It would all have been mine. But then Dad
had to come and tell me that Alex Friend didn’t actually
exist. His real name was Alex Rider. And everything I’d
done, everything I’d been through was for nothing!”
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249
Razim had already noticed that when Julius became
angry, he spoke with a South African accent. He was
angry now.
“He was a bloody spy! I couldn’t believe it! And after
that, everything went pear shaped. He managed to escape
and then he killed Dad and that was the end of it.”
“I can understand how much you must hate him. But
even so, you were wrong to disobey me.” Razim spoke
softly, but there was an edge to his voice. “Going to the
school was foolish. If you had been seen, it could have
ruined everything.”
“I was seen!” Julius laughed. “I put on that uniform
you gave me and I just walked in through the school
gates. So much for all their precious security! They took
one look at me and they thought I was him. I went into
Gunter’s office and I waited and I saw him leave. He
actually turned around.”
“He saw you?”
“No. Don’t worry. But I think he sensed me. It was
quite interesting, really. It was like a sort of telepathy.”
“And how did you feel?”
“Now you’re sounding like my bloody psychiatrist, if
you don’t mind my saying so, Razim. How do you think
I felt? If I’d had a gun, I’d have used it then and there. I
had to stop myself from running out and strangling him
with my bare hands. I’d have loved to have done it. I
really would.”
In the courtyard, two of the guards had appeared with
shovels and a wheelbarrow, walking toward an enormous
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
mound of salt on the other side of the well. It was directly
underneath the rope walkway. The salt had been pounded
until it was fine and it seemed to Julius that it had a life of
its own, shifting and swirling in the breeze. A third guard
stood above, watching them.
“What are they doing?” Julius asked. The men had
begun to scoop out the salt, loading it into the barrow.
“The salt has come out of the lake. We mix it with
sand to make bricks.” Razim gestured at one of the half-
finished buildings. “One day this will be a library. I also
plan to construct a small concert hall.”
Julius sniffed. “You’d have thought it would all dis-
solve in the rain.”
“It has not rained here for a hundred and ten years.”
“That’s a lot of salt. Maybe we could take off all Alex’s
skin and roll him in it. That would really hurt.” Julius
giggled. “You are going to let me torture him, aren’t you,
Razim?”
Julius had already attended several of Razim’s
experiments. Only that morning they had been working
on a tourist they had picked up in Alexandria. Julius had
watched with fascination as Razim jotted down his
findings. Unfortunately, the tourist hadn’t lived very
long.
“You enjoy my experiments?” Razim asked.
“Yes. Very much. Don’t you?”
“I do not derive pleasure from them. I have never
really understood pleasure. For me, they are a scientific
necessity—nothing more, nothing less.”
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251
“Well, I like them a lot.”
“And in answer to your question, I will allow you to
spend a little time with Alex Rider. And I can promise you
that you will cause him more pain than he has ever
known. You will have your revenge, my friend. But only
if you do as you are told. I will not have you putting this
operation at risk again. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Julius scowled.
“Good. Scorpia has made too many mistakes in the
past. I do not intend to make any myself. Alex Rider will
be with us very soon, and from the moment he arrives we
are going to have to take extreme care.”
Julius finished his soda. Almost immediately, and with-
out being signaled, a servant ran forward with another.
“The gun will have to be decontaminated tonight,”
Razim continued. “And make sure you don’t touch it
again until it’s in place. Meanwhile, it would seem that we
do have one small problem that we’re going to have to
deal with.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“This morning I received a coded transmission from
Zeljan Kurst in Paris. MI6 have taken one precaution that
we could not have foreseen. They have sent an agent out
here to keep a watch over Alex Rider while he is in Cairo.
He is a very fat man by the name of Smithers.”
“Is that bad?”
“No. On the contrary. He visited Alex at his apartment
the day he arrived and we have photographic evidence
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that we can add to the Horseman file. It’s further evidence
that MI6 have been running a covert operation in Egypt.
However, as we move toward the critical stage, I do not
think we can afford to have him on the scene. It’s too
dangerous.”
“So?”
“So this is my plan.” “Mr. Smithers must die. I will
have it done tomorrow. From what I have heard, and
despite his ap- pearance, he is an extremely effective
secret agent. So I think I will send perhaps a dozen men.”
“That seems a bit over-the-top.”
“Learn from me, Julius. Maybe one day, when this
present operation is concluded, you will join the ranks of
Scorpia . . .”
“Really? Do you think they’d have me? I’d love that!”
Razim smiled. He had already decided that he was
going to kill Julius as soon as he had no further use for
him. That idea he had just suggested . . . flaying him alive
and then rolling him in salt. That might be interesting.
“We take no risks. We make no mistakes. Tomorrow
morning we kill Smithers and tomorrow evening . . .”
“Alex Rider!”
“That’s when it begins . . .”
16
I N S I D E E V E R Y F AT
M A N .
.
.
THE STREET WAS JUST five minutes from the souk, but
it was surprisingly quiet and empty, with just a few chil-
dren kicking a soccer ball around in the dust and not a
tourist in sight. The taxi dropped Alex off at a few min-
utes before eleven o’clock. He had already contacted
Smithers using the notepad with its hidden circuitry.
Smithers had rung back immediately to confirm.
The house wasn’t difficult to find.
When Alex had been walking around the city with
Jack, he had noticed a few old European buildings here
and there . . . elegant and somehow out of place, as if the
Egyptians hadn’t noticed they were there and so had for-
gotten to knock them down. They dated back to the nine-
teenth century—the Suez Canal had been built at the
same time—and might once have housed French noble-
men or engineers. Smithers had chosen one of these and
added a few touches of his own.
It was a tall, narrow building on three floors, con-
structed out of gray stone with dark brown shutters and
a little balcony protruding over the front door. What
made it almost unique in this crowded city was that it
stood alone, set back from the road. A gate opened onto
a path that swept up the center of a lawn that was more
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
dust and sand than grass. There were two stone lions fac-
ing each other about halfway up and, to one side, a tall
fountain with water tinkling down in graceful loops. It
was obvious that the house belonged to an Englishman.
There was a large mat in front of the door with the single
word: WELCOME. A small Union Jack fluttered on the roof.
Alex was already dressed for the flight home—in jeans
and a dark red Hollister polo shirt. It was a little warm for
the city, but Jack was packing the rest of his clothes and
she had told him it was raining in London. He walked up
the drive, his feet crunching on the gravel, and rang the
doorbell. There was a mirror set in the wall on each side
of the door and he examined the two reflections of him-
self as he waited. A moment later, the door opened and
Smithers appeared.
“Do come in, Alex. Very good to see you. I was just
boiling the kettle. I hope you’ll have a cup of tea and per-
haps a slice of homemade cake?”
Smithers was more informally dressed than he had
been at the apartment, wearing pale trousers and a bril-
liantly colored short-sleeve shirt. He could have walked
straight off a cruise ship . . . All that was missing was the
straw hat and the camera. He stepped back to allow Alex
into a hall that was shaped like a hexagon with a marble
floor, a chandelier, and rather strangely, golden-framed
pictures of the royal family on each of the walls, with the
queen and the Duke of Edinburgh glancing at each other,
side by side, opposite the door. There was an ornate table
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 255
with what looked like a TV remote control sitting on the
top. But there was no sign of a TV.
“This way!” Smithers bustled ahead into the kitchen,
which was dominated by a stainless steel fridge. He threw
it open to reveal shelves stacked with food, much of it
flown in from England. There was a large cake on the
middle shelf. “A Victoria sponge,” he explained. “Can I
interest you?”
“Not really, thanks, Mr. Smithers. I’ll just have a
Coke.”
“Will you stay for lunch?”
“I haven’t got time.”
“A short visit, then! Very well. Let me see . . .”
Smithers put the cake back, then carried two Cokes
and a bowl of chips into the living room, an airy, old-
fashioned space with plump sofas, bookshelves, and a
splendid rug that must surely have come out of the souk.
And yet, as Alex sat down, it occurred to him that the
house told him very little about the man himself. It could
have belonged to anyone. What did he actually know
about Smithers, now that he thought about it? Was he
married? Where did he live when he was in England?
What did he do in his spare time, apart from cooking
himself Victoria sponges? But of course, that was the
world of MI6 and all its agents. They didn’t just live with
secrets. Secrecy surrounded their entire lives.
Smithers helped himself to a handful of chips. “So
you’ve taken my advice and decided to leave,” he said.
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
“Yes.” Alex hadn’t told Smithers anything. “How did
you know?”
“I’m afraid I was tipped off the moment your Miss
Starbright booked the flights over the Internet,” Smithers
explained. “We keep a very careful watch on the move-
ments of our agents, Alex. Half past three this afternoon.
You’re right. That doesn’t leave us time for lunch.”
“I came to say good-bye.”
“That’s very decent of you.”
For some reason, Alex felt a sudden twinge of guilt. “I
hope you don’t think I’m walking out on you, Mr. Smith-
ers,” he said.
“Not at all, my dear boy. Although I do wonder if this
has something to do with the explosion in Cairo yesterday
afternoon? The House of Gold. There has been a great
deal of excitement about that—and not just in London. I
don’t suppose you were in any way involved?”
Quickly, Alex brought Smithers up to date, starting
with the office break-in, the contents of Gunter’s desk,
then the phone call and the events on the paddle steamer.
This time, he didn’t leave anything out, and after he’d
finished describing the waterboarding, Smithers pounded
the table with his fist, making the rest of the chips jump.
“I like the Americans,” he exclaimed, “but sometimes
they’re completely intolerable. I shall make an official
complaint, Alex. They had no right to do that to you.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Smithers. I’m all right now.” Alex
shrugged. “Anyway, maybe Gunter really is going to take
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 257
a shot at the secretary of state when she comes to Cairo.
But as far as I can see, there’s nothing going on at Cairo
College. I don’t have any need to be there. So I’m going
home.”
He took out his iPhone and laid it on the table.
“I’m afraid this got completely ruined when it went
into the Nile. But you might be able to get something out
of it. I took pictures of all the stuff in Gunter’s desk. I still
don’t know why he had a picture of a coat hook there.
And there was also a brochure about a place called Siwa.”
Alex stopped—then remembered. There was one other
thing. “I managed to leave the bug behind.”
“I know, Alex. I’ve been listening in to Mr. Gunter’s
office all day, but so far he hasn’t said a single thing of
any interest. In fact, he barely says anything at all.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I haven’t really been very help-
ful to you this time.”
“You shouldn’t apologize.” Smithers’s voice had
changed. He was suddenly very serious, talking in a way
that Alex had never heard before. And he got the strange
feeling that this new voice didn’t belong to the man he
had known for more than a year. It was as if he was see-
ing the real Smithers for the first time. “And what you just
said now—about walking out on us—it’s complete stuff
and nonsense. I’m glad you’re going. If you want the
truth, I was always opposed to your getting involved in
our business in the first place.”
He paused, then continued more slowly.
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
“I never spoke my mind because it’s not my job. I do
what I’m told, like everyone else. But it was wrong . . .
quite wrong, getting you involved. People think that being
a spy is fun and exciting. Your uncle was a bit like that. It
was all a big adventure as far as he was concerned . . . and
look what happened to him. The truth is that spying is
dirty, dangerous work and it’s quite unfit for a child
who’s still at school. I won’t deny that you’ve been useful
to us, Alex. But at what cost? You were very nearly killed
at Liverpool Street—that was unforgivable—and you’ve
spent a whole year surrounded by death and deception.
Nobody should have asked you to do that.
“So you’re absolutely right to be getting out now. I
don’t know what’s happening here in Cairo, but I’ll tell
you this. It’s got a very nasty smell. Leave it. Go home.
And the next time Mr. Blunt or Mrs. Jones calls you,
don’t pick up the phone. You should forget about us all.”
Smithers stood up. Alex knew that in his own way he
had just said good-bye. Permanently. Alex got up too and
the two of them shook hands.
And then the doorbell rang.
“That’s very strange,” Smithers said. “I’m not expect-
ing any visitors.”
Alex followed him back out to the hall. Smithers
snatched up the remote control that Alex had noticed ear-
lier and pressed a button. At once, the royal family disap-
peared. Each gold frame contained instead a television
screen with several views of the house, taken from differ-
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 259
ent angles. The garden was empty but there was a man
outside wearing a FedEx uniform, carrying a small parcel.
Smithers moved over to the wall and spoke into a
microphone close to the door. “What do you want?” he
asked.
“I’ve got a parcel for a Mr. Derek Smithers,” the man
said.
“I’m afraid I’m rather busy at the moment. Can you
leave it outside?”
“I’m sorry, sir. You have to sign for it.”
“Just give me a minute.” He clicked the microphone
off and turned to Alex. “I think we may be in trouble,” he
said. “This is an MI6 safe house. I designed it myself. But
nobody knows I’m here, certainly not any parcel delivery
companies.”
“Who do you think . . . ?” Alex looked at the screen,
at the man waiting outside.
“Let’s take a closer look.”
The buttons on the remote control were almost too
small for his pudgy fingers, but he chose another one and
pointed the device at the TV screen. The image flick-
ered
and changed. Now the man in the FedEx uniform had
become a gray-and-white ghost of himself. Alex remem-
bered the mirrored panels he had seen. That must be where
the X-ray cameras were hidden. And they revealed two
things. The box that the man was delivering was empty.
And he was carrying a gun. The shape of the weapon,
tucked into the back of his trousers, was unmistakable.
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
“Now that’s interesting,” Smithers muttered. “Do you
think this chap followed you here? Or has he come for
me?”
“Either way, I hope you’re not going to let him in,”
Alex said.
Smithers smiled. “I don’t think so.” He pointed the
remote at the door. “I actually put the welcome mat in
myself. Occasionally, though, it becomes an unwelcome
mat, as he’s about to find out.” His thumb stabbed down.
The doormat collapsed. It was hinged, like a trapdoor,
and the fake FedEx man had been standing right in the
middle of it. With a yell, he disappeared from sight.
“What’s underneath?” Alex asked.
“It heads directly to the Cairo sewers about ten yards
down,” Smithers replied. “He’ll have a soft landing, but
I’m afraid it won’t be a pleasant one.”
“Mr. Smithers . . .”
Alex pointed at another of the monitors, which only
moments before had been a portrait of the Prince of
Wales. It showed the front gate. Two cars had pulled up,
and even as he watched, half a dozen men poured out, all
of them Egyptian, all of them dressed in dark clothes.
Perhaps they were all in radio contact, but somehow they
seemed to know what had just happened. Warily, they
made their way up the garden path. Two of them had
machine guns slung across their chests. The others were
carrying automatic pistols.
“How many gadgets do you have in this house?” Alex
asked.
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 261
“Not enough.” Smithers nodded at a third screen.
Four more men had joined the others, coming around the
side of the building, bringing the total to ten. They were
spreading out, surrounding the house like an invading
army.
“What time did we say your plane was?” Smithers
asked.
“Three thirty.”
The men were getting closer.
“Then we’d better get a move on. We don’t want you
to be late.”
Smithers was still holding the remote control device,
and Alex wondered what else it could do. The collaps- ing
doormat had been simple but effective, and at least it
had reduced the odds by one. But there were a lot of
determined-looking men crossing the front garden, ap-
proaching the front door—and as far as Alex could see,
that was the only way out. The attackers were all armed
and they were taking no chances, moving carefully one
step at a time, as if they were in a minefield. Smithers
looked from one TV screen to the next. Alex had never
seen him like this before. Like so many fat men, he had
always seemed carefree and jolly. But right now, as he
timed his next move, he was deadly.
One of the screens showed the pair of stone lions. Two
men were passing between them, each one clutching a
nasty-looking snub-nosed miniature machine gun, and
Alex wondered if they really dared use them here, in the
middle of a city that was always on the alert.
But there could be no doubting the determination
in their
eyes and in their very body language. They had come
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
here for the kill. By the time the police arrived, they would
be far away.
Smithers waited for the exact moment, then hit the
next button. The two men partially disappeared in a cloud
of white dust that sprayed out of the lions’ mouths. They
were still there when it cleared, gazing at each other,
wondering what had just happened. Alex had no idea ei-
ther. He glanced at Smithers, who said nothing. Then
one of the men threw away his gun and began to roll on
the grass. A second later, the other did exactly the same.
They were like small children, writhing on their backs,
kicking their legs, and screaming. They had completely
forgotten where they were or why they had come here.
“Itching powder,” Smithers muttered. “Super-strength.
It was actually developed in the last war, but I’ve made a
few improvements. To be honest with you, I’ve been itch-
ing to try it!”
The others had seen what had happened and looked
at the two men, still rolling helplessly, in disbelief. Some-
body shouted a command and they advanced on the
house, colder and more angry than ever. Alex could see
eight of them spread over the TV screens. He glanced at
the door. Would it be strong enough to hold them back?
As if to answer the question, that was when they
opened fire. Their weapons had been silenced, but even
so, the sound of the bullets slamming into the walls, the
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 263
windows, and the front door was deafening. It was like
being inside a tin box in a hailstorm and Alex flinched
despite himself. But the door didn’t so much as splinter.
The windowpanes didn’t crack.
“The door’s armor plated!” Smithers shouted out.
“And the windows are bulletproof glass. They’re not
going to shoot their way in.”
“Can they cut their way in?” Alex asked.
“Yes. But they’d need—”
Smithers stopped. Alex had already seen it on the
screens. Two of the men had run forward, both wearing
body armor, their heads protected by welding masks.
They carried with them an oxyacetylene torch with a cut-
ting head capable of reaching temperatures up to 3500˚C.
While the others fell back, the team knelt in front of the
door, and a moment later there was a burst of harsh blue
flame as they fired up the torch. Almost at once, Alex
smelled burning. The inside of the door began to change
color as it was attacked by the fierce heat, and a moment
later a tiny tongue of flame burst through and began to
move, curving around the handle and the lock.
“Well, they’re certainly well prepared,” Smithers mut-
tered. He sounded more irritated than afraid.
“Can you hold them off?” Alex asked. “Unfortunately,
not. This is only a grade three safe
House.
Alex caught sight of a man swinging his arm. He was
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
halfway down the garden, captured on one of the screens.
For a crazy moment, Alex thought he was playing catch
. . . then he understood. It wasn’t a ball. It was a grenade.
It hit the roof and exploded. The whole house shook,
sending the chandelier into a furious, jingling dance.
Dust and broken plaster rained down and smoke
billowed down the main staircase. Meanwhile, the oxy-
acetylene torch was making steady progress. The hissing
flame had already moved a quarter of the way around the
lock.
“I think we’re going to have to make a run for it,”
Smithers said.
“Run?” It wasn’t a word that Alex would ever have
associated with Smithers. A fast waddle would surely be
the best he could manage. And anyway, how were they
going to get out?
“There’s a back way.” Smithers must have known
what he was thinking. “Don’t you worry about me,” he
added. “The main thing is that you not get hurt.” He
searched out another button on the remote control. Out-
side, the fountains stopped, and even as the last drops of
water splashed down, they released a cloud of yellow
smoke instead. The gunmen began to stagger across the
lawn, covering their eyes and coughing. “Tear gas!”
Smithers explained. “Shame this isn’t England or I could
have had them with my exploding gnomes.”
Despite the defenses, the men had almost cut through
the front door. The circle of burned-out metal was nearly
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 265
complete. Smithers hurried back through the hall and
into the kitchen and to Alex’s astonishment headed
straight for the fridge. Surely this wasn’t the time for a
snack! But when Smithers threw open the door, the food
and the shelves had disappeared. Instead there was a
stainless steel tunnel leading straight to the street. Behind
them, Alex heard the front door crash open.
“After you!” Smithers cried.
Alex went first. It was a tight squeeze for Smithers,
but he followed right behind and a few seconds later they
were out in the street. Smithers still had the remote con-
trol. He pressed one last button and began to move away
as fast as his legs would take him.
There was an explosion inside the house. Then an-
other. Alex heard the screams of some of the men and
wondered what exactly had blown up. The sofas? The
toilet? With Smithers it could be anything.
It seemed to Alex that their best plan would be to dis-
appear as quickly as possible into the crowd before rein-
forcements arrived—but that wasn’t going to be easy. For
a start, the streets were too quiet. And anyway they had
already been spotted. Alex heard a van screech to a halt.
The back doors were thrown open and five more men
came bundling out. Alex didn’t have time to see if they
were armed too . . . nor did he have to look. There was a
gunshot and a bullet spat into the brickwork close to his
head. A few children had been playing soccer but they
scattered instantly. An old man with a donkey and
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
cart stood trembling with wide eyes, unsure what to do.
Alex could hear the sirens of approaching police cars.
They must have been alerted by the first grenade. But it
was impossible to tell how near they were or, given the
Cairo traffic, how quickly they might arrive.
Alex and Smithers ran around a corner, past the en-
trance to a mosque, and down an alleyway with fresh
laundry hanging on lines above their heads. It was close
to midday. The sun was directly overhead and the heat
was fearsome. Alex wondered how far Smithers would be
able to run before his heart gave out. But he was already
determined. No matter what happened, he wasn’t going
to leave the gadget master behind.
Smithers reached the end of the alley and came to a
breathless halt, glancing left and right as he weighed up
his options. “The souk!” he gasped. “We can lose them
in the souk.”
“Who are they?” Alex demanded.
“Scorpia,” Smithers replied, and the single word told
Alex everything he needed to know. Nobody else would
have dared mount an armed assault in the middle of a
highly populated Middle Eastern city. Nobody else was
more determined to see him dead. From the very start,
even when he had been attacked at Brookland, he had
been aware of something unseen, some old enemy steal-
ing out of his past. Well, now he knew. Part of him was
grateful to Smithers for telling him the truth. But he was
also angry. Blunt must have known that Scorpia was ac-
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 267
tive in Egypt. Yet even so, he had sent Alex here like some
sort of sacrificial lamb, forcing them to make their move.
For just a brief pause, Alex and Smithers were alone.
Alex guessed that the Scorpia agents had decided to re-
group. They would be waiting to see if any survivors
came out of the house.
“Did you tell anyone you were coming to see me?”
Smithers asked.
“No. Only Jack.”
“Were you followed?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then they didn’t know you were coming. It’s just bad
luck you were with me. I’m the one that they’re after.”
A figure appeared at the top of the alleyway. Alex and
Smithers set off again, crossing a courtyard of debris,
past a couple of shops with interiors so dark it was im-
possible to see what they actually sold. The main road
was in front of them, divided in half by ugly concrete pil-
lars supporting a second road overhead. The traffic had
become a solid, unmoving wall—in fact, the explosions
and the approaching police must have brought the entire
city to a halt. There were people streaming past in every
direction. The sidewalks simply weren’t wide enough to
contain them, and much of the available space was taken
up by Egyptians with stalls selling sandals, light-
ers,
scarves, souvenirs . . . each one managing to block the
way ahead.
Smithers pointed. A metal footbridge led above the
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
chaos, up and over to the other side. Alex could feel the
sweat pouring off him. The clothes he was wearing were
for England. He certainly hadn’t expected to run in them.
He didn’t look back. Somehow he had the idea that if he
managed to cross to the other side he might be safe.
It wasn’t the case. Halfway across the bridge, Smithers
stopped to catch his breath. Alex turned and saw the five
men from the van appear at the side of the road. There
were two or three more behind them . . . the survivors
from Smithers’s safe house. He and Smithers were in
plain sight—but surely even Scorpia wouldn’t take them
out in front of so many witnesses. He shouldn’t even have
framed the question. A hail of bullets hit the metal side of
the bridge, and as Alex dived for cover, they ricocheted all
around. Remarkably, in all the noise and the confusion,
nobody seemed to hear the shots. The two of them could
have been killed without anyone even noticing.
Alex caught Smithers’s eye. The big man was crouch-
ing uncomfortably beside him. “Can you call for help?”
he asked.
“I’m afraid not, old bean.” “You
must have more gadgets!”
“Just one!” Smithers checked the way was clear, then
stood up again and ran forward. Alex had no choice but
to follow—across the bridge and down the other side.
Behind them, the five Scorpia agents were already
clambering up the first steps, determined to follow them
into the souk.
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 269
For that was where they were now. Alex had plunged
into a series of courtyards and alleyways so densely
packed together that it was hard to say if he was inside or
out. The Khan el-Khalili souk was the biggest in Cairo, a
twisting labyrinth of tiny shops connected by steps,
arches, and passages, with all manner of goods piled high
on shelves, dangling from walls, and spilling out onto the
street. Alex and Jack had already been there and had
found the experience almost too much.
“You want gold? I make you good price.”
“Please—come in, my friend. No need to buy!”
“You English? Jolly good chap!”
Every shop had its own hawker trying to draw them
in. And every hawker seemed to be selling the same thing:
the same earrings, rugs, spices, decorated boxes, and in-
cense sticks that Alex had already seen in the House of
Gold and that were sold by everyone else. Everything
here was somehow desirable. There was nothing that
anyone really needed.
And now they were back in the middle of it with at
least eight armed men less than a minute behind them.
“This way!” Smithers commanded.
He had already lurched down a corridor that special-
ized in sheeshas, the slender glass pipes that many Egyp-
tians used to smoke fruit-flavored tobacco over bubbling
water. As he went, his arm or leg must have knocked into
one. The result was a domino effect. Pipe after pipe top-
pled into the next with a terrible smashing of glass and
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
the outraged howls of the hawkers. Alex felt someone
reach out and try to grab them. He wrenched himself free
and kept going.
They passed through a soaring archway, part of a
stone tower that might have housed a princess out of an
ancient fable. There were thick pillars and narrow, barred
windows. The archway led into a square filled with stalls
and shops on all sides. The tourists were already evacuat-
ing the area. It was obvious that something was going on.
They were surrounded by police cars. There were sirens
howling in the air. And people were running! Nobody
ever ran in the souk. The whole point of life there was to
take it slowly. By the time Alex and Smithers stumbled to
a halt, taking in their options, they were almost alone.
Only the astonished shopkeepers gazed at them from be-
hind half-open doors, wondering what was going to hap-
pen next.
There were three ways out of the square, but Alex saw
at once that they were blocked. Yet more Scorpia men had
been brought in, and this group had somehow second-
guessed them. They were closing in from every direction.
At least these new arrivals didn’t seem to have guns. But
they were carrying knives with long, vicious blades and
they were ready to use them. Alex and Smithers were un-
armed apart from the one gadget he had mentioned and
that might be anything. What next?
“Mr. Smithers!” Alex called out the warning as one of
the men raised his knife and moved in for the kill. At the
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 271
same time, Alex ducked sideways and grabbed a brass
pyramid, one of thousands on sale in the souk. It made
an ugly souvenir—but it was heavy, with a lethal point,
and that made it a useful weapon. Alex hurled it with all
his strength, watching with satisfaction as it sailed over
Smithers’s shoulder and hit the knife man in the center
of his forehead. The man went down like a stone, drop-
ping his knife. Smithers snatched it up, spun it in his
hand, and threw it across the square. Alex looked around.
A man had appeared just behind him, carrying a machine
gun. The knife turned in the air, then buried itself in his
chest. As the man fell back, his trigger finger tightened
and suddenly he was spraying the air with bullets. About
a dozen glass lamps exploded. Brass plates were blown
off their hooks, falling with a great clatter. The windows
of a silver shop shattered. Then it was over—but the si-
lence after the last bullet was immediately broken by more
sirens, frantic shouting, the panic of people trying to get
away.
There were still two more knife men. Before he could
react, Alex was seized from behind. He felt himself being
dragged away and tried to struggle—but the man was too
strong for him. He writhed helplessly, expecting to feel
the point of the knife slide into his back at any moment.
He wondered why it hadn’t happened already. Out of the
corner of his eye, he saw the other knife man close in on
Smithers, who was standing in front of him, his great
chest rising and falling as he caught his breath.
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Alex had to break free. As he was pulled back, he
passed a spice shop with sacks of powder and leaves piled
up outside. He knew at once what he had to do. His hand
shot out and scooped up as much brown powder as it
could hold. Then he twisted around and flung it into the
man’s face. It was chili powder. The man screamed as it
invaded his eyes and nostrils. He couldn’t breathe. He
was blind. Alex felt the man release him. He pulled free,
then turned around and lashed out with a side kick—the
yoko geri he had been taught at karate, his foot powering
into the man’s solar plexus. The man was thrown back
into a counter filled with silver jewelry. He smashed
through the glass, his head and shoulders disappearing.
His legs twitched for a moment, then became still.
Alex wanted to rest, but he could see the last knife
man closing in on Smithers on the other side of the
square. The man was smiling, perfectly balanced on the
balls of his feet, about to strike. Alex looked around him
for another weapon. There were none—but then he no-
ticed one of the brass plates that had been shot off its
hook. He picked it up and threw it in a single movement.
Unconsciously, he was back on the beach—with Tom
Harris, with Sabina—playing Frisbee. The plate was
heavier, but it was exactly the same shape, and its aero-
dynamics were more or less the same. It was a perfect
throw. The plate sailed across the square, curving slightly,
then crashed into the side of the knife man’s neck. Alex
saw his eyes go white and his legs crumple. He collapsed,
leaving Alex and Smithers facing each other, alone.
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 273
Smithers seemed amused by the whole affair. “Well
done, Alex,” he crowed. “I always wanted to see you in
action and you really are as good as they say!”
“I think we have to get out of here, Mr. Smithers,”
Alex panted. They had taken out four of the men but he
knew there were plenty more.
“Quite right. It’s time I disappeared.”
“What?”
“No time to argue. It’s me they’re after. That much is
obvious. Heaven knows why. Mr. Blunt will find out. The
important thing is for you to get on that plane and get
home.”
“But what about you?” Alex couldn’t keep a note of
dismay out of his voice. Smithers would be easy to spot
wherever he went. It wasn’t just his clothes. It was his
bald head, his size.
“They won’t be able to find me if they don’t know what
they’re looking for,” Smithers replied. He reached down
between his legs. “This may come as a bit of a shock,
Alex, old chap.”
For a moment, Alex thought that Smithers was about
to unzip his trousers. He was certainly unzipping some-
thing. As he straightened up, there was a tearing sound
and the waistband of his trousers divided into two. His
shirt did the same . . . and to Alex’s horror he saw that
Smithers’s bulging stomach was also splitting in half. It
was like a snake shedding its skin. The brightly colored
shirt and the plump, oversized arms fell aside as a second
pair of arms, lean and suntanned, appeared from inside,
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pushing their way out. The shoulders rolled away and
finally the bald head with its round cheeks and several
chins crumpled and fell back as a younger head emerged,
and Alex saw what should have been obvious from the
start.
A fat suit! That was Smithers’s last and most brilliant
gadget—and he had been wearing it from the day the two
of them had met. The real Smithers was actually thin and
wiry and about ten years younger—in his late thirties,
with short brown hair and blue eyes. He was looking at
Alex with a mischievous smile, and when he spoke again,
even his public-school accent had gone. It seemed that he
was actually Irish.
“I never meant to deceive you, Alex,” he explained. “I
developed the Smithers disguise for work in the field, but
somehow I got used to it. It was like my office suit . . . you
know?” Quickly, he tucked the rubber and latex body
behind one of the stalls. He was now wearing scruffy
jeans and a T-shirt. For his part, Alex was too astonished
to speak. “I don’t feel comfortable taking it off now, if you
want the truth. I feel as if I’m exposing myself. But needs
must . . . if I’m going to get out of this place alive. No time
to worry about it now. We’d better go different
directions. Get home to Jack. Give her my best wishes.
Try not to mention this if you can help it.”
And then Smithers was walking briskly away. Alex
watched him climb down a flight of stairs and turn a cor-
ner, and then he was gone. He was reminded of an ad-
I n s i d e E v e r y F a t M a n . . . 275
vertisement he had once seen in a newspaper . . . for diet
pills. What had it said? “Inside every fat man there’s a
thin man trying to get out.” Well, he’d just witnessed a
vivid demonstration of that—although if he hadn’t seen
it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it.
He retraced his steps, putting as much distance be-
tween himself and the square as possible. Smithers might
be wrong. The Scorpia people could still be looking for
him. As he hurried away, a group of white-suited tourist
police ran past him. The House of Gold yesterday and
now this! Cairo must be wondering what had hit it. All the
shops had locked their doors. Alex joined a crowd of
frightened tourists and followed them as they made their
way out of the souk.
Somehow he managed to find his way back to the
bridge that he and Smithers had crossed. He tried to hail
a cab, but he realized at once that he didn’t have a hope.
They had all been taken by people wanting to get back to
their hotels, and anyway the police must have set up
roadblocks everywhere. Nothing was moving.
He looked at his watch. Almost half past twelve. He
still had plenty of time to make the plane. Jack had given
him her own mobile phone and he used it to call her at
the apartment. There was no answer. That was odd.
Maybe he had misdialed. Jack had definitely told him she
would wait for his call. He called again and allowed the
phone to ring ten times, but there was still no answer.
Where was she?
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Suddenly, Alex had a bad feeling. Jack wouldn’t have
left the apartment. She might have heard that there’d
been a further disturbance in Cairo, but she wouldn’t
have come out looking for him. So if she wasn’t answer-
ing the phone, where was she?
Alex was on his own. Smithers had gone and he had
no one else to call. Pushing through the crowds in the lin-
gering heat of the afternoon, he hurried away from the
souk, following the main road back into the center of the
city, searching for a taxi or a bus or anything that would
give him a lift, knowing with a sense of dread that he had
to get home.
17
C I T Y OF T H E D E A D
ALEX FINALLY MANAGED TO FLAG down a cab in the
Opera Square—an open space full of modern shops and
ugly offices, cut in half by an overpass. It still took him an
hour to get back to Golden Palm Heights, and half the
time he found himself motionless, sweating on the back-
seat, surrounded by traffic. He rang the apartment three
more times. There was still no answer and he had to
clamp down on his imagination, trying not to think the
worst. But the fact was that if Jack had had to go out, if
there had been some problem with the school or with the
air tickets, she would have called him first. There was
something terrible about the silence and Alex clutched the
mobile until his hand was aching, hoping against hope
that it would ring.
He was also worried about Smithers. It still made his
head spin to think of the young Irishman who had stepped
out of the fat suit. His work clothes, that was what he had
said, but it must have taken a bizarre frame of mind to get
rigged up like that every day. It just went to show that you
couldn’t trust anyone or anything that belonged to the
world of espionage.
As he sat in the back of the cab, waiting for a traffic
light that seemed to be stuck deliberately on red, Alex
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cursed Alan Blunt and Mrs. Jones—and himself for lis-
tening to them. They had set him up against Scorpia
without even telling him. And Alex was absolutely certain
now that whatever was going on in Egypt had nothing to
do with the Cairo International College of Arts and Edu-
cation. It was as if he had been lured there deliberately,
part of the evil jigsaw puzzle that Scorpia was putting
together. Well, to hell with all of them. Alex just wanted
to find Jack. It was time to get out.
After what seemed like an eternity, the taxi turned into
the compound—silent and empty now as it was still a few
hours before the end of school. Alex gave the driver a
handful of bills without even bothering to count them, got
out of the car and ran into the apartment. The front door
was open. Was that a good sign or a bad one?
“Jack!” He called out her name, standing in the mid-
dle of the living room. Despite everything, he had still
hoped she would be here and he was disappointed by the
silence, by the knowledge that he was alone. He could see
that she had been packing. There were two suitcases open
on the floor, both of them full. The few books and bits
and pieces that they had brought from England were
neatly stacked beside them along with some cash and
their passports. There was a half-finished glass of Coke
on the kitchen table. Alex examined it. The ice had melted
and the liquid was lukewarm. She had been here. She had
been getting ready to leave. Something or someone had
disturbed her.
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Then Alex saw the letter pinned to the bedroom door.
A white envelope with his own name written on it. His
first thought was that it wasn’t Jack’s handwriting. There
was already a hollow pit in his stomach as he took it down
and opened it. What he read made it worse.
We have Jack Starbright. If y
o
u want t
o
see
her again, c
o
me t
o
the City
o
f the Dead at
3
:
00
p.m. this aftern
oo
n. The T
o
mb
o
f the 👉r
o
ken
M
oo
n. D
o
n
o
t be late. D
o
n
o
t speak t
o
any
o
ne.
If y
o
u call MI6, she will die. If y
o
u c
o
ntact the
sch
oo
l, she will die. If y
o
u are n
o
t al
o
ne, she
will die. We are watching y
o
u n
o
w. We are
listening.
O
bey these instructi
o
ns
o
r y
o
u will
never see y
o
ur friend again.
Alex felt physically sick. The marble floor seemed to
be shifting beneath his feet. Three o’clock! He looked at
his watch. It was already after two. They had left him
hardly any time . . . presumably on purpose. Despite that,
he forced himself to slow down, to think this through.
The wrong decision now could kill them both.
He knew about the City of the Dead. They had actu-
ally been talking about it at school only a few days before.
It was a vast cemetery in the north of the city, not far
from the Citadel. The Tomb of the Broken Moon? He
could find that when he got there. But should he go there
at all? If he allowed himself to be captured, he would
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
be no use to Jack. They might simply kill him then and
there. After all, this was Scorpia he was talking about,
and he had given them more than enough reason.
But that didn’t make sense. If they wanted him dead,
that would have been easy enough to arrange. They could
have had someone waiting with a gun in the apartment.
They needed him for some reason—perhaps the same
reason that had drawn him to Cairo in the first place.
This wasn’t about Cairo College. It was about him. If he
walked into their trap, who could say what the conse-
quences might be? But if he didn’t, Jack would die.
He could get a message to Smithers. He still had the
electronic notepad. But it wasn’t worth the risk. First of
all, Smithers had been forced to abandon his home and
might not even have access to his computer. And anyway,
Scorpia might be able to intercept the message. He could
ring England. He could leave some sort of written mes-
sage here. But Alex had no doubt that the apartment
would be thoroughly searched. It was probably bugged
even now. The note had made it perfectly clear what
would happen if he tried to disobey the instructions.
It took him about fifteen seconds to run through all
the options and to come to the only possible conclusion.
He had to do what he was told. He had to deliver himself
into Scorpia’s hands and hope that some sort of oppor-
tunity would arise further down the line. The one thing
he wouldn’t do was put Jack’s life at risk. He remembered
how she had insisted on coming with him on this trip.
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How he wished now that he had persuaded her to stay
behind.
He was already out the door and back down the
stairs—and at least there was one piece of luck. The taxi
that had brought him from Cairo was still parked outside,
the driver talking on his mobile phone. Alex had snatched
up another handful of cash before he left, and he banged
a fist on the window, showing it to the driver.
“The City of the Dead,” he instructed. “Can you take
me there?”
The driver nodded.
“Do you know a place called the Tomb of the Broken
Moon?”
The driver’s eyes were still fixed on the money. “I
know it.”
“You can have all this if you get me there in half an
hour.”
The driver must have had enough English to under-
stand, because Alex had no sooner got in than they were
away with the back tires spinning and spitting up dust.
He gazed out of the window, trying to assemble his
thoughts. Why did they want him to come to a cemetery?
Was there something ominous about the choice? Perhaps
he should try calling someone after all, using Jack’s mo-
bile. But that was too dangerous. It was always possible
that Scorpia agents were following in another car. And
the iPhone itself could be bugged.
The City of the Dead, also known as the Northern
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Cemetery, lay sprawled out next to the Salah Salem
Highway with lanes of traffic roaring past continuously,
filling the air with fumes of burned rubber and gas. It
really was a city in itself, dusty and crumbling, hammered
by the sun. Ever since the fourteenth century, the Egyp-
tians had brought their dead here, building not just tombs
but miniature complexes with mosques, mausoleums,
and even living rooms for relatives who happened to visit.
The wealthier the family, the more elaborate the complex,
with high brick walls and arched doorways leading into
courtyards that really could be someone’s home. Indeed,
a lot of the poorer people of Cairo had seen an opportu-
nity and had actually moved in so that many of the build-
ings were now occupied with TV screens flickering
behind windows, television antennas on the roofs, and
laundry hanging on lines that stretched over the graves.
There were even a few bars and supermarkets with cans
and bottles spread out on wooden shelves that might once
have held dead bodies.
The taxi slowed down once they entered the cemetery.
It was impossible to speed through the narrow, twisting
streets. The driver seemed to be looking for something
and suddenly drew in, stopping beside a wooden door.
Alex saw a name—TORUN—written in Arabic and English
characters on a plaque. Was this the place? The driver
pointed and he looked up. There was a dome and a min-
aret surmounted with a crescent moon that someone had
shot at. The bullet had snapped off one end. The moon
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was a Turkish symbol. Torun could well be a Turkish
name too. Had a Turkish family moved to Cairo, died in
Cairo, and decided to be buried in Cairo? At least Alex
could be fairly sure that he was in the right place.
He gave the driver all his money. With his nerves tin-
gling, he got out of the car and went through the door.
He heard the taxi pull away behind him and knew that he
was on his own. He looked at his watch. It was five to
three. He had completed his part of the bargain. He won-
dered what would happen next.
Alex was surrounded by three walls. The fourth had
crumbled away, revealing more tombs scattered haphaz-
ardly and a few shrubs and trees. No squatters seemed to
have moved into this part of the cemetery and Alex was
quite alone. He felt trapped, hemmed in on all sides. As
far as he could tell, the City of the Dead stretched out for
at least a mile, and at this time of the afternoon, in the full
heat of the sun, there would be few tourists or visitors.
He heard footsteps. Somebody was approaching. Alex
drew himself up, his whole body tensed, not sure what to
expect. A figure appeared.
Alex stood where he was, completely shocked, as he
watched himself walk between the graves.
It was him. The boy had his face, his hair—cut in
exactly the same style. He was even dressed similarly, as
if he had deliberately checked out what Alex was wearing.
The only thing that was different was the cruelty in his
eyes. Alex had never smiled like that, with such a degree
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of malevolence. And suddenly he knew who it was . . .
who it had to be.
Julius Grief stopped. “Surprised?” he asked.
Alex didn’t speak. He was angry with himself. He re-
membered the face he had glimpsed in the window as he
left school. He should have recognized him then. And the
photograph he had seen in Gunter’s desk. At the time it
had puzzled him . . . when had it been taken? But the
answer was simple. It hadn’t actually been a photograph
of him.
“Do you know who I am?” Grief asked.
Alex nodded. “Where’s Jack?” he demanded.
“You don’t ask questions,” Grief replied. He was obvi-
ously relishing this. He couldn’t contain his glee. “From
now on, you do exactly as you’re told or she gets killed.
Do you understand that? We’re going on a little journey
together, you and me. And if you cause me any trouble,
she’s the one who’ll pay.”
“I’m not going anywhere until I’ve spoken to her,”
Alex said.
Grief’s face darkened. “I don’t think you understand
how this works. You’re nothing now, Alex Rider. You’re
not special. You’re not a superspy. You have no idea
what’s coming your way. I’m in charge. I’m the one who
says what you do.” Suddenly, as if changing his mind, he
took out a mobile, pressed the redial, and spoke a few
words. “All right,” he went on. “You can talk to Jack. But
only if you ask me nicely. You have to say please.”
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“Please, may I speak to Jack?” Alex measured out the
words.
“Get on your knees.”
Grief was taunting him with the phone. He was be-
having like any school-yard bully. But Alex had to know
if Jack was alive. He knelt down in the dust. Grief nod-
ded, pleased with himself. He stepped forward, towering
over Alex, and handed him the phone.
“Jack?” Alex muttered the single word.
“Alex—don’t do anything they say. Get help.” It was
definitely Jack’s voice. But then the phone was snatched
away at her end. The line went dead.
“Satisfied?” Grief held out his hand for the phone.
Alex handed it back. He was already wondering how the
boy had escaped from wherever MI6 had sent him. What
was his part in all this? And did anyone know he was
free? One thing was already certain. He was quite mad,
worse even than he had been the last time they’d met, on
the roof at Brookland. “From now on, you call me ‘sir,’ ”
Grief continued. “And you speak to me only when you’re
spoken to. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
The telephone slammed into the side of Alex’s head,
almost throwing him off his knees. He swayed and
reached out to steady himself against a tomb. “Do you
understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Grief held all the cards. There was no point
fighting with him yet.
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“That’s good. Now get up and start moving. We’ve
got a car waiting for us nearby.”
Grief gestured. Alex got up. The side of his head was
pounding. He wondered briefly what would happen if he
took Grief out here and now. It would be easy enough.
Twist around, a side kick to the stomach. But they still had
Jack. Until she was safe, there was nothing he could do.
They made their way back through the cemetery. Alex
knew this was bad . . . worse than anything that had ever
happened to him. Scorpia had its own agenda, still un-
known to him. But Grief clearly had just one thing on his
mind. He wanted revenge and he was going to make him
suffer. Alex walked slowly, trying to ignore the pain in his
head. He wouldn’t give up. His chance would come. He
just had to make sure he didn’t miss it.
There was a black limousine waiting not far from
where the taxi had dropped him off and, standing beside
it, a man whom Alex knew. Erik Gunter was waiting, the
sun reflecting off his forehead, his eyes dark and watchful.
He was dressed in the same suit and tie that he wore every
day at Cairo College; presumably he had left school early
today to be here. The only difference was that there was a
gun in his hand, but Julius nodded at him and he tucked
it away, seeing that the situation was under control.
“Hello, Tanner,” he said jovially. “Or maybe I should
call you by your real name now. Rider! It looks like you’ve
reached the end of the line.”
“So have you,” Alex replied. “MI6 has a file on you.
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You may have been a war hero in Afghanistan, but they
know you’ve switched sides and that you’re working for
Scorpia. When this is over, they’ll come looking for you.
And they’ll find you. There’s nowhere in the world you’ll
be able to hide.”
Gunter smiled, but his eyes were troubled. “Maybe I’ll
have to change my face,” he said. “Like Julius.”
Julius! So that was his name. It was the first time Alex
had heard it.
Gunter glanced at the red welt on the side of Alex’s
head, then at the other boy. He scowled. “You weren’t
supposed to mark him,” he said.
“He was rude to me.”
“Razim won’t be pleased.”
Alex filed the information away. It might be useful
later. Who was Razim? Presumably the man in charge.
For some reason he needed Alex not just alive but unhurt.
That might be helpful.
Gunter went over to the car and opened the trunk. He
leaned in, and when he straightened up, he was holding
a sophisticated weapon, a sniper rifle, complete with
scope. Alex remembered the golf bag that he had seen at
the House of Gold. He had no doubt that this weapon
must have been inside. At some time Gunter had slipped
a glove onto his right hand. He was holding the rifle by
the barrel, taking care not to leave fingerprints.
“Before we go, I want you to take this,” he said. “And
don’t get any funny ideas. It’s not loaded.”
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“What do you want me to do with it?”
He had no sooner spoken the words than he felt a
sharp jab in the ribs. He had been hit, hard, from behind.
“You don’t ask questions. You just do as you’re told,”
Julius said.
Alex took the gun. It was heavier than he had ex-
pected. He held it awkwardly, unsure what was expected.
“Aim it at me,” Gunter said. “Go on. I’m sure you’d
love to kill me. Aim it at my head.”
Alex did as he was told.
“Now pull the trigger.”
Alex hesitated.
“Go on. Do it.”
Alex put his finger around the trigger and squeezed.
There was a click but no explosion. As Gunter had said,
the gun wasn’t loaded.
“I bet that felt good,” Gunter mocked him. “Now—
hold it there.” He took out a digital camera and squeezed
off a few shots: Alex and the gun, a brick wall behind him,
nobody else in the picture. “That’s great,” he said. “That’ll
make a nice addition to the Horseman file.” He held out
the gloved hand. “Now, let’s have the gun back, please.”
Alex handed it over. He had a good idea what was
going on here. He also knew that there was nothing he
could do. Gunter put the rifle back in the trunk, then
opened the car door. “Get in,” he instructed.
“Where are we going?”
“I’d just do what I tell you—unless you want Julius to
hit you again.”
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Alex climbed in. Gunter closed the door and wandered
around to the driver’s seat. Julius Grief sat next to him, a
bundle of scowling, angry energy. Alex guessed that he
was still angry at being told off.
They drove back onto the highway and about a mile
out of Cairo. The sun was just beginning its downward
curve by the time they turned off, following a rough track
to a patch of wasteland—yet another unfinished building
site. There was a large, old-fashioned helicopter waiting
there with a pilot already checking the controls. The he-
licopter was a Sikorsky H-34, once popular with the U.S.
Army but no longer in production, with an engine
mounted at the nose and a cockpit big enough for a dozen
men. It was much bigger than the machine that Alex had
brought down over the river.
“This is as far as I come,” Gunter said. “I have to take
the gun back where it belongs. But I’ll be seeing you again
the day after tomorrow, Alex. Enjoy the flight! In fact, if
you want some advice, you should enjoy everything while
you can. You don’t have a lot of time left.”
Alex got out of the car. Julius Grief pushed him for-
ward, his hand slamming into Alex’s back. Alex climbed
into the Sikorsky. The cabin had been constructed to
house an entire squadron and it was so spacious that he
could almost have parked a car inside. There were straps
and rigging hanging off the walls and the door slid back
far enough to allow parachutists to exit cleanly. Two
benches faced each other across the void. Alex wondered
if Jack had sat on one of them before him.
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Julius had followed him in. “Sit there.” He pointed at
one of the benches.
Alex did as he was told. The blades began to turn and
he heard the whine of the engine rise up until it over-
whelmed him. At last it was ready. The pilot pulled at the
controls and the helicopter lurched off the ground. It
hovered for a moment, then turned and rose up, carrying
Alex away.
18
H E L L IS
W A I T I N G
THE SCORPION WAS ABOUT an inch long, perched on the
windowsill as if trying to catch the first rays of the
morning sun. It was an unpleasant color, a strange sickly
yellow that was almost transparent against the light. It
had barely moved for the last ten minutes, its tail curving
above its head. This one had to be a baby. The Androcto-
nus australis—or Egyptian fat-tailed scorpion—can be
more than four inches in length, and a full-grown adult is
one of the deadliest insects in the world, with a sting that
is often fatal.
Alex lay on his bunk, watching it. This was the second
scorpion he had seen since he had woken up, climbing
over the brickwork on the other side of the bars—and
he guessed that there must be a nest somewhere below.
Fortunately, neither of them had come any farther into
the cell.
He had only a vague idea where he was—some sort of
ancient fort in the Sahara desert. The sun had just been
setting when they arrived, touching down on an area of
sand that must have been treated in some way so that it
wasn’t sent spinning into the rotors. As he had climbed
out, the first thing he had seen was a miniature fort, about
two hundred yards away, that looked like something out
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of an old film or perhaps a Tintin book. There was no
other sign of life. After about a mile, the sand turned sil-
very gray, and he realized that he was looking at the edge
of a huge lake. There was something odd about the water.
It looked utterly dead.
The heat was intense, buffeting his face. He could
smell aviation fuel from the helicopter. He already knew
that even if he managed to escape, there would be no way
out. There was simply nowhere to go. Where was Siwa?
That was the name on the brochure that he had found.
But if the oasis town was anywhere around him, it was
out of his sight.
“Get in the jeep, Alex.” Julius Grief had climbed out
of the helicopter and stood beside him. “There’s someone
waiting to meet you.”
Alex said nothing but did as he was told. The jeep had
been waiting beside the landing area with a driver in Bed-
ouin dress and another man with him, carrying a rifle.
Alex got in the back. Julius sat in the front. They started
up and drove the short distance to an arched entranceway
and two massive gates. As they passed into the fort, the
gates swung shut behind them, meeting with a solid and
conclusive thud.
And now there was activity all around him. As the jeep
slowed down, Alex took it all in: Arab guards with ma-
chine guns, a radio tower, satellite dishes, more jeeps,
watchtowers, and spotlights. There was a man drawing
water from the well, another digging at some sort of salt
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293
pile. Overhead, a rope and wooden walkway stretched
from one side to the other. He counted about a dozen
buildings of different sizes, including one that looked like
a chapel and one that was more like a doll’s house.
There was no sign of Jack.
“This way,” Julius said.
Alex followed his doppelganger into a long, narrow
building set right next to one of the walls. He found him-
self in a cool, empty space with a fan turning in the ceil-
ing and a wooden floor. There was a desk and a chair with
a Cairo College uniform neatly folded and hanging on the
back. Two guards, silent and emotionless, stood waiting
for him.
There was a movement at the door and another man
strolled in. Before the man had even spoken, Alex felt the
atmosphere in the room change. He turned and found
himself facing a short, very slender man with close-
cropped gray hair and round glasses. The man looked too
small and girlish to be dangerous, but Alex knew he must
be in charge.
He stopped in front of Alex and examined him.
“What happened to his face?” he demanded.
“I hit him,” Julius replied.
“That’s very displeasing, Julius. I specifically asked
you not to do that.”
“He annoyed me.”
The man turned to Alex. “Welcome to Siwa,” he said.
“My name is Razim, and I’ve been looking forward very
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much to meeting you. I have to say, you do have a re-
markable similarity to Julius Grief, a credit to the artistry
of modern plastic surgery. I hope you didn’t find the
journey too stressful.”
“Where is Jack?” Alex demanded.
“She’s here. She’s unhurt—for the time being.”
“I want to see her.”
“I’m sure you do, but I’m afraid that won’t be possi-
ble. As a matter of fact, I’m afraid you have a rather dis-
tasteful experience ahead of you. Believe me when I say
that I take no pleasure in it, but I’m aware that in the past
you have been equipped with certain ingenious gadgets
and I also know that your Mr. Smithers has been in
Cairo. So I’m afraid you’ll have to be stripped and
searched from head to foot. I won’t actually witness this
myself. I’ll spare your blushes. But I would advise you
to cooperate with my guards or they will hurt you quite
considerably.
“After that, you will take a shower and all your clothes
will be replaced. We have a school uniform for you there,
on the chair. We don’t want any exploding buttons or
anything like that. As you can see, Alex, I am not a man
who makes mistakes. You are now in my power and will
remain so until the end of your life.”
“That’s not a very long time,” Julius muttered.
“That is indeed the case.” Razim sounded almost sad.
“But we can discuss that in the morning. After the guards
have finished with you, they’ll take you to a cell. You
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295
might be interested to know that we are in an eighteenth-
century French fort, and this used to be the prison block.
You will be given dinner and then left to sleep. I advise
you to take advantage of it. You’ll need all the rest you
can get.”
Julius smirked. Razim nodded at the guards, who
moved forward.
“Good night, Alex. We will meet again tomorrow.”
“Sleep well!” Julius crowed.
The two of them left together and then the guards
began their work. Two hours later, Alex found himself
back in school uniform, alone in a cell that measured
about thirty feet square with a bunk, a table, and a bucket
for him to use in the night. There was a single barred
window that looked onto the outer wall with a long
shadow stretching out in the corridor in between. After
about twenty minutes, the door opened and another
guard came in with a tray holding bread, soup, and a
bottle of water. This was all he was going to get for the
night.
But there was no point in starving himself. Alex ate the
food and drank half the water. He curled up on the bunk
and a short while later, despite everything, he was asleep.
And now it was the morning, and the scorpion, alarmed
by something, suddenly scuttled forward and disap-
peared over the windowsill. Alex looked up at the sun. He
guessed it must be around eight o’clock. A moment later
the guard who had brought Alex’s dinner returned, dressed
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in baggy trousers with a scarf around his head. There was
a machine gun slung across his back. He signaled with
one hand. The message was clear: Come with me.
Alex was led back out of the cell and down the pas-
sageway to the area where he had been received the night
before. As he went, he heard a familiar voice.
“Take your hands off me, you creep. Who do you
think you are, anyway? Just because you’ve got a gun—”
Jack! Alex hurried forward and there she was, stand-
ing in front of the desk, poking her finger into the chest
of a man who was twice her size. She was dressed in the
clothes she must have been planning to wear for the
flight—pale jeans and a shirt tied around her waist. Her
hair was a bit bedraggled and there was a tiredness in her
eyes, but otherwise she looked fine.
Ignoring the guard who was right behind him, Alex
ran to her.
“Alex!”
The two of them embraced. They were surrounded
by armed men, but for the moment all of them were
forgotten.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked.
“I’m fine. But I told you. You shouldn’t have come.” “I
didn’t have any choice, Jack. I couldn’t just leave
you.”
“I know.” She held him close. “Don’t worry,” she
whispered. “I think I’ve found a way out of here.” Then,
louder: “Who are these people, Alex? What is this place?”
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297
“I don’t know,” Alex replied. “But I think we’re going
to find out.”
“Come. Now.” One of the guards had managed two
words of English. He pointed at the door. Alex and Jack
were led out of the prison block.
It was early morning, but the sun was already hot. Alex
and Jack were led past the main gate and across to the
house where Razim lived. Alex looked around him. He had
already counted a dozen guards and there were probably
more. This was the home of someone who liked to feel
extremely secure. Ahead of them, Razim was waiting for
them on a small terrace that he had constructed in front of
his home. There was a stone table surrounded by dwarf
palms sprouting out of terra-cotta pots. A stone lion drib-
bled water into a basin, the tinkling sound giving an illu-
sion of cool in the desert heat. As usual, he was wearing a
white dishdasha that looked brand-new. He was eating
breakfast: fresh figs, yogurt, pastries, and tea. There was
also a pack of cigarettes—Black Devils—beside him. Alex
was glad to see that the table was set for three. It seemed
that Julius Grief wouldn’t be joining them.
Seeing them, Razim got to his feet. “Please join me. I
hope you don’t mind my starting without you. I never
sleep after five o’clock and I’m always rather hungry by
the time it comes to breakfast. However, there’s plenty
left. Do sit down.”
Jack glanced at Alex as if for advice. Alex nodded and
they took their places.
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Razim seemed pleased. He fussed over them, moving
dishes and pouring the tea as if they were guests who had
chanced to pop in rather than his prisoners. Meanwhile,
Alex looked around him. It was already obvious that it
would be almost impossible to escape from the fort, and
yet, at the same time, he remembered what Jack had just
said. “I think I’ve found a way out . . .” She’d been here
a little longer than he had. Could she possibly have seen
something that he’d missed?
“Will you have some tea, Alex?” Razim held out the
pot.
“Thank you.” Alex hated the fake politeness, the pre-
tense that all this was civilized. He’d been here before.
Tea in the garden with Damian Cray. Dinner with Julia
Rothman. All these people had to pretend that they were
human. To disguise the fact that they were anything but.
But Jack wasn’t having any of it. “What do you want
with us?” she demanded. “Alex ought to be at school.
You’ve got no right to bring him here.”
Razim set down the pot and helped himself to a
spoonful of yogurt. “Let’s not keep up the pretense that
Alex is an ordinary schoolboy, Miss Starbright,” he said.
“We all know who he is and what he is. And for that mat-
ter, you really shouldn’t speak to me as if I am an ordi-
nary man. Of course I have no right to keep you prisoners
here. But I am a criminal. Why not let us be honest about
it? The law means nothing to me. I do exactly what I
want.”
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299
“What
do
you want?”
“You’re very direct! Please have some breakfast. You
both need to eat and—particularly in this heat—to
drink.”
Alex took some fruit. Jack hesitated, then did the
same. A man walked past them pushing a wheelbarrow
piled high with salt crystals. Whatever work went on here,
it never stopped.
Razim licked his spoon clean. “That’s better,” he
began. “I’m sure the two of you have a lot of questions,
so let me put your minds at rest by answering at least a
few of them.”
“You don’t need to tell us anything,” Alex interrupted.
“I already know that you’re part of Scorpia and that
you’re planning to assassinate the American secretary of
state when she gives her talk in Cairo this weekend. I also
know where we are. We’re close to the town of Siwa.” At
least some of this was guesswork, but Alex was pleased to
see a flicker of surprise behind the two circles of glass.
Razim had been thrown and couldn’t conceal it. “I know
this,” he went on, “and MI6 knows it too. By now they’ll
have realized that Jack and I are missing and they’ll come
looking for us. If you let us go now, you might have time
to save yourself. But otherwise I’d say you’re pretty much
finished.”
There was a long silence. Then Razim broke into a
forced, unnatural laugh. “Well spoken, Alex,” he said.
“My friends at Scorpia told me you were someone to be
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
reckoned with and they were certainly right. I am willing
to accept that you have managed to work out at least part
of what we are planning. You have seen the rifle. It is
common knowledge that the secretary of state will be
here tomorrow. But it is already too late to prevent us,
and I can assure you that you have no idea at all of our
true aims.
“As to the arrival of MI6, which I am inclined to doubt,
they may find it more difficult than you think to reach us.
This fort was built more than two hundred years ago, but
I have made certain modifications. We are in the middle
of a minefield. There is what you might call a necklace of
roadside devices, similar to those used in Afghanistan,
around the compound. We can activate them the moment
we come under attack . . . There’s a series of switches in
the control room.” He gestured at the old bake house
with its brick chimney. “You might also like to know that
the towers here are equipped with radar warning and
electronic warfare antennae. We have enough firepower
here to blast an entire fleet of aircraft out of the sky. The
Iranians kindly provided us with several of their SA2
medium-range, high-altitude surface-to-air missiles. At a
price, of course. But I am a man who likes to feel safe,
and were any enemy forces to show themselves—in the
air or on land—I can assure you that it would be a simple
matter to blow them to smithereens.”
He smiled and laid down his spoon, lining it up ex-
actly with his plate.
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301
“But even if by some miracle MI6 did manage to find
us and break in, they would still be too late,” he contin-
ued. “I am leaving Egypt tomorrow night. I have another
identity and another life waiting for me in another part of
the world. And as for you, Alex . . . well, that was what I
wanted to talk to you about. That’s why I invited you to
join me.”
He paused. Alex glanced at Jack, willing her to stay
quiet, not to endanger herself. He knew she wasn’t going
to like what they were about to hear.
“I will make no secret of the fact that you have been a
considerable nuisance to my colleagues in Scorpia,” he
began. “Indeed, one of the things that attracted them to
this operation was that you were going to be at the center
of it. Speaking personally, I have no interest in revenge.
And I want you to understand that I have no particular
feelings about you. You seem a pleasant enough boy. But
unfortunately for you, you are now completely in my
power and, as it happens, I am a scientist. Recently, I
have been doing a great deal of research into the subject
of pain. This evening, when the sun sets, I intend to per-
form an experiment on you. In effect, my aim is to cause
you more pain than you have ever known, more pain than
you can begin to imagine.”
“You’re mad . . . ,” Jack whispered.
Razim ignored her. “It’s strange, but imagining pain
actually makes it worse when it finally arrives. This is
something I have discovered through my research. I no-
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tice that you are clutching a fruit knife, Miss Starbright,
and perhaps plan to attack me with it. I can assure you
that one of my guards will shoot you down before you can
even rise out of your chair.”
Jack’s hand had indeed closed around one of the
knives. She was hardly breathing and her eyes were pin-
pricks of fury. Alex reached out and touched her arm. She
put the knife down.
“Thank you. Now, where was I? Yes. It’s a bit like
entering a swimming pool. The child who imagines the
cold water, who enters it one inch at a time, has a much
worse experience than the child who simply runs off the
diving board and jumps in. The dread that one feels be-
fore visiting the dentist is often as unpleasant as the visit
itself. That is why I’m telling you this now, Alex. I want
you to start thinking about what lies in store for you to-
night. You see that building over there?” He pointed to
what looked like a chapel on the far side of the com-
pound. “That is where you will be taken. That is where,
for you, hell is waiting.”
“You can’t do this,” Jack said. “You’re a monster! Alex
is a fifteen-year-old boy!”
“It is because he is fifteen that he is so useful to me.
And please don’t bore me with this stupid name-calling.
I have already made it quite clear to you that Alex Rider
is nothing to me. I am not like Julius, for example, who
hates him very much indeed, who is indeed consumed by
hatred. I have no such emotions. For me, hate is as much
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303
a waste of time as love. Alex has been a useful device in a
plan that I have created for Scorpia. Tonight, he will be
useful to me. That is all. I simply want the two of you to
prepare.”
Razim said, “You have the rest of the day to
yourselves,” he said. “You are free to walk in the desert . .
. The salt lakes have a certain beauty, and you may like to
swim. I can lend you both bathing suits. Do not take this
as a sign of weakness on my part. You have no drinking
water and it would be quite impossible for you to walk
the ten miles to the vil- lage of Siwa in the full heat of
the day. And anyway, you will be watched at all times. As
you may have appreciated when you were brought here,
Alex, I have reasons for not wanting to damage you. But
if you stray too far from the fort, if you attempt to do
anything that gives me reason to believe that you are
trying to escape, I will not hesitate to put a bullet into
your friend. Do you understand me?” “I understand you
completely,” Alex said. There was
contempt in his voice.
“Good.” He stood up. “I have a few last-minute prep-
arations to take care of, but please feel free to have as
much breakfast as you want. Lunch will be served here as
well. The guards will take you back to your cells at four
o’clock—you’ll need to get as much rest as you can be-
fore your experience tonight. I hope you both enjoy what
time is left to you.”
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Razim got up and left. Jack waited until he had gone
into the house.
“Oh, Alex . . . ,” she began. The words came out al-
most as a sob.
“Let’s not talk here,” Alex said. “We might be over-
heard.” He looked briefly at the archway and the open
door that led out of the compound. It was still hard to
believe that Razim was just letting them walk out. But
then again, they were in the middle of the Sahara—a
perfect prison even if it didn’t have any walls. “He said
we could go for a swim, so let’s do that. No one will be
able to hear us in the middle of a lake.”
In the end, they didn’t swim. Two of the guards had
followed them and stood watching, twenty paces away.
Instead, they walked along the shoreline of one of the
extraordinary lakes that had somehow sprung up in the
middle of the desert, with so much salt in the water that
strange crystal formations were spreading out across the
sand. The fort was about a quarter of a mile away and
reminded Alex of something he might have built when he
was six or seven years old.
They had both heard what Razim had said. Neither of
them knew quite what to say. Alex knew that Razim had
done this on purpose. He might pretend to be a scientist.
He might claim to have no feelings. But deep down, he
was getting some foul pleasure from their pain.
It was Jack who broke the silence! I won’t let him hurt
you, Alex. I swear
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to God . . .” Suddenly there were tears in her eyes and this
time she didn’t try to wipe them away. “I never had any
idea,” she went on. “When you went away on all those
adventures, I knew it was bad, but I never thought it was
like this. How could we have let this happen to you all this
time? And your uncle actually wanted you to be a spy?
They’re all as bad as each other . . . Alan Blunt, Mrs. Jones
. . . even Mr. Smithers.They should never have al- lowed
it to happen.”
Alex put an arm around her. “Don’t worry, Jack,” he
said. “I’ll get away.” He forced a smile. “I always do.”
Jack nodded and used the backs of her hands to wipe
her eyes. “If we could steal one of the cars . . .”
“I can’t drive,” Alex reminded her.
“No. But I can.” Her face brightened a little. “There
is just one thing, Alex.” She looked around, checking that
the guards were far enough away. “Before you arrived, I
was alone in my cell for a time, and there was something
I noticed. The walls are brick, but the cement is some sort
of mixture of salt and mud. And one of the bars of my
window is a little loose.”
“Can you get it out?”
“I might be able to. Look!” Carefully, she lifted her
shirt to show Alex that there was a knife tucked into her
waistband. “I stole it at the end of breakfast, after that
creep had left. I can use it to cut into the brick. It’s very
soft. And if I can get the bar out, I can squeeze through.”
“And then?” Alex felt the first stirrings of hope.
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“Somehow I get you out of your cell and off we go.
When they flew me here, we passed over Siwa. I actually
saw it, and it can’t be more than about ten minutes away
by car. If we can get there and raise the alarm . . . We just
have to make one phone call. And that’ll be the end of
Ratface—or whatever he calls himself. He won’t have
time to come after us. He’ll have to get out fast.”
“What about the car keys?” Alex asked.
“I noticed that too. They leave them in the cars.” Jack
smiled. “You see—they’re not as smart as they think they
are.”
Alex thought about what Jack had just said. Everything
made sense, and yet at the same time, something worried
him. Three basic errors. The crumbling metal, the car
keys, the knife that had gone missing without anyone no-
ticing. It seemed almost too good to be true. On the other
hand, Jack could be right. Razim thought he had all the
odds on his side. That could be making him careless.
“All right,” Alex said. “But listen to me, Jack. If you get
a chance to leave without me, that’s what you have to do.”
“I’d never leave you behind,” Jack said.
“You might have to. If it’s a choice between one of us
or neither of us, you’re going to have to go.” He reached
out and held her hand. “And please watch out for your-
self, Jack. I’ve met people like these before, and I’m tell-
ing you, they know what they’re doing. This is Scorpia
we’re talking about.”
“You’ve beaten them twice,” Jack reminded him.
Alex nodded. “Let’s hope it’s third time lucky.”
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• • •
They spent the rest of the day together, sitting in the
shade, talking about anything that would take their minds
off the clock ticking away, the evening drawing in. Alex
tried to forget what Razim had said.
“. . . more pain than you have ever known . . .”
They talked about Brookland, about Sabina, about the
apartment in Chelsea . . . about anything that would fill
the silence. There was no sign of Julius Grief, and Razim
seemed to have disappeared too. Maybe they were both
inside. The sun was blazing down and there was barely
any breeze. But slowly the light changed. The tempera-
ture began to cool. At half past three a guard appeared
and, in broken English, told them that it was time to go
back to their cells. Neither of them wanted to show any
emotion in front of these people, so they embraced briefly.
“Good luck,” Alex whispered.
“I’ll come for you. I promise . . .”
They were led their separate ways.
Alex was taken to his cell. Jack’s was farther down the
corridor, on the opposite side. Before the doors were
locked, Alex was able to look around him, and he saw,
with a heavy heart, that Razim was being true to his word.
He was taking no chances. A wooden chair had been
placed in the middle of the corridor and there was already
another guard sitting there. If he heard the slightest
sound, he would raise the alarm.
The two doors slammed shut. The keys were turned.
Time slowed down. Alex felt every minute as it lum-
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bered past. He knew that all this was part of Razim’s
plan. He wanted him to think about what lay ahead, and
Alex tried as best he could to put it out of his mind.
“. . . more pain than you can begin to imagine . . .”
But of course he couldn’t. What were they going to do
to him? Alex remembered the scorpions that he had seen
that morning. Maybe that was their plan. No. Stop. Don’t
even think of it. Don’t let your imagination do their work
for them.
All too quickly, the sun began to set. Why couldn’t it
hover in the sky a little longer? Why was it suddenly so
eager for the end of day?
Darkness fell. The door swung open and Julius Grief
was there.
He had also changed into a Cairo College uniform as
if determined to mimic Alex to the bitter end. “It’s time!”
he crowed. “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking for-
ward to this!”
There were two guards with him, both of them armed.
Alex stood up. He had no choice. He stepped out into the
corridor. There was no sign of Jack.
With Julius Grief striding ahead, the three of them led
him out.
19
H E L L IS H E R E
A
LEX COU LDN’T MO VE.
He was sitting in a high-backed leather chair, strapped
in place by soft cords around his wrists, his ankles, and
his neck. No matter how much he struggled, they would
make no mark. A series of wires ran down his naked
chest. Each one had been carefully positioned and stuck
in place by an unsmiling female technician in a white
coat; she was the only woman Alex had seen since he had
arrived at the fort. There were more wires attached to two
of his fingers, his pulse, his forehead, and the side of his
neck.
The air-conditioning had been turned up high and
Alex could feel his own sweat chilling against his skin.
With its thick, white-painted walls curving around him,
the room reminded him of an oversized igloo. He was
connected to a variety of machines that were already
measuring everything that was happening inside him.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see a green dot puls-
ing across a screen, and he knew it was recording his
heartbeat. The dot was moving very fast. He tried willing
it to slow down, but he was no longer in control. Alex
hated the way that he had been reduced to nothing more
than a laboratory specimen, but there had been nothing
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he could do. They had finished by wheeling a large TV
screen in front of him, and he had wondered what it was
for. Was Razim going to show him some sort of horror
film? Nothing could be worse than the horror that was all
around him. For the moment, the television was turned
off. The technician and the guards had withdrawn, leav-
ing him alone.
Alex waited to see what would happen next. He
thought about Jack. Even now there was a part of him
that was more scared for her than for himself. He had
been in situations like this before. A lot of unpleasant
people had threatened him with a lot of unpleasant things,
but somehow he had always come through. But this was
all new to her. While he sat here, she would be putting
her plan into operation, trying to escape. He just hoped
she would take care. She had no idea what she was up
against.
Footsteps on the concrete floor. Julius Grief had re-
turned, this time in the company of Razim. The boy’s face
was flushed with excitement and anticipation, and it
made Alex’s stomach churn to see this grotesque version
of himself capering toward him. Razim had changed into
a pale gray collarless jacket and trousers that made him
look like an upmarket dentist. He was wearing an ear-
piece with a wire snaking down behind his shoulder. As
he stopped in front of the chair, the spotlights reflected in
his spectacles and his eyes briefly disappeared behind two
blazing circles of white.
H e l l
I s
H e r
e
311
“Are you afraid, Alex?” he asked.
Alex didn’t answer. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
“Would you like a glass of water before we begin?”
Still, Alex said nothing.
“A great many people have sat where you are sitting
now,” Razim went on. “I have conducted many experi-
ments in this room, and one day the world will be grateful
for the information I have gathered. It is very unusual for
me to have a teenager, and in normal circumstances it
would suggest to me many possibilities.”
He reached out. He was standing next to a trolley cov-
ered with a sheet, and he uncovered it to reveal a long line
of knives and scalpels, neatly laid out. Alex knew that he
was doing it purposefully for effect. It was the act of a bad
stage magician in a cheap theater. He tried not to look at
the gleaming instruments. He already knew that he
couldn’t break free. All he could do was sit and wait.
“As you can see, there are all sorts of ways that I could
cause you pain, Alex,” Razim murmured. “My young
friend Julius has ideas of his own. Left to himself, he
would, I am sure, do unspeakable things to you, starting
perhaps with your toes and working up. He would have
enjoyed that very much. Unfortunately, I cannot allow
him to go ahead. We are both somewhat limited, for rea-
sons that I won’t go into at the moment. You cannot be
marked in any way. No cuts or bruises! No bits missing!
And so, with regret, we must say farewell to the knives
and the syringes. There will be no bloodshed tonight.”
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He covered the trolley and pushed it away. “However,
do not believe for a minute that this offers
you some sort of easy way out. I have made it my life’s
work to study pain in all its different forms, and the pain
that I intend to inflict on you will be perhaps even worse.
There are two instruments that I am going to use. Earlier
today, I promised you hell. And now, my dear child, it is
here.”
He reached down and took hold of two plastic boxes.
Alex recognized one immediately. It was a remote con-
trol, presumably for the television screen in front of him.
The other was similar, about the size of a mobile phone,
with a single red button mounted in the center. Razim
handed this to Julius, who took it gratefully, licking his
lips and rolling it in his palm.
Razim tapped his earpiece as if awaiting instructions.
“Are you ready, Alex?” he asked. “There’s something I
want you to see.”
He turned on the TV.
Jack had begun working on the bar the moment she had
heard Alex being taken from his cell. As the footsteps
faded into the distance, she felt a black steel mesh of
shock and disbelief slamming down in her mind. Jack had
always thought the best of people. She had refused to
believe that anyone could be completely heartless and
evil. Her breakfast with Razim had proved her wrong.
She had seen the guard sitting outside in the corridor
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and had no idea if he was still there. She hoped that
Razim wouldn’t have considered her important enough
to watch over while he dealt with Alex. Even so, she would
have to work quietly. And quickly. What were they going
to do to him? How soon would they start? Jack felt the
tears rising and angrily wiped them away. Crying wasn’t
going to help Alex. She had to get out of here.
The window looked out onto a strip of sand and rub-
ble with another building, possibly a storehouse, directly
opposite. There were just two vertical bars, solid steel, set
side by side, as if in a cartoon. She had to remove only
one of them and she would have enough space to squeeze
out. And one of them, as she had discovered, was loose.
The fruit knife that she had stolen from the breakfast
table was small, with a blunt edge. Even if she had been
able to use it to attack Razim, it was unlikely that she
would have been able to do him much harm. But it was
surprisingly effective against the crumbling brickwork
that surrounded the bar. She was using it like a chisel,
chipping away, making sure that the rubble fell into the
cell where nobody could see it. The cement was very soft,
almost like putty. And maybe it had rained—did it ever
rain in the desert?—because it was damp to the touch.
The bar was already wobbling. Soon she would be able to
pull it free.
But how soon? Alex had been gone for about ten min-
utes and she dreaded to think what they might be doing
to him. It was worse than that. She had to use all her
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mental strength not to think about Alex, to put him out of
her mind. Otherwise, she would be too sick to continue.
She was his only hope. She was going to break out and
bring help. She had come all the way to Egypt to look
after him and she wasn’t going to let him down.
She had scooped out a lot of the cement, forming a
cavity around the bar. She pulled and it came free. It hap-
pened so suddenly that she actually dropped it, trying to
grab it with fumbling fingers and only half catching it as,
with a dull clang, it hit the floor. She froze, terrified that
the sound of metal hitting concrete would alert the guard
if he was still sitting outside. She waited a minute, her
heart pounding. Nobody came. The door didn’t open.
She pulled herself up and stuck her head out of the
gap she had made.
The cell block was in one corner of the fort—on the
side opposite of Razim’s house. Leaning out, Jack could
just glimpse the main courtyard with the salt pile that the
guards had collected. The sun was setting and the sky
had gone that strange color unique to the desert, some-
thing between blue and mauve and washed-out over the
horizon as if recovering from the heat of the day. There
was nobody in sight.
Jack was about to heave herself up, then had second
thoughts and grabbed the metal bar and looped it through
her belt. It was the only weapon she had and she might
need it. Getting out of the cell wasn’t going to be easy.
The bunk was in the wrong place and screwed down to
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the floor. There was no chair. She had to hoist herself up,
using the muscles in her arms, and then pull her head and
shoulders through the narrow space between the remain-
ing bar and the edge of the window.
Somehow she managed to maneuver herself so that
she was dangling half outside, and she twisted around,
wincing as the loose metal bar dug into her stomach. For
a moment she thought she was stuck. Her hips were the
widest part of her body and they refused to pass through.
She was almost prepared for the humiliation of being dis-
covered and dragged back inside. If anyone walked
around the back of the storehouse, they would be certain
to see her. The thought gave her extra strength. One final
squeeze and she had made it, falling in a tangle of arms
and legs to the ground below.
She landed heavily, winding herself. There were marks
all the way down the side of her body where she had po-
sitioned the bar. For about five seconds she didn’t move.
Surely someone would have heard her. She had made so
much noise! But perhaps the guards were at dinner. Per-
haps they were helping to deal with Alex. Alex . . . what
are they doing to you? I can’t wait. I have to get help. Nobody
came. Jack picked up the bar and got to her feet. Now all
she had to do was steal a car and drive away.
The main courtyard was about fifteen paces away, on
her right, and this is where she headed, following the wall
of the storehouse. It seemed to her that the shadows were
darker on the other side, away from the prison block. The
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courtyard was where the cars were kept parked. She had
seen them earlier. About halfway along, she came to an
open doorway with a pile of crates and boxes stacked up
around it. There were lights on inside—it was already
night—and she peered in nervously. It was a kitchen.
There was a fridge, a microwave oven, some cupboards,
a table, and chairs. Maybe this was where the guards
came to eat and relax when they were off duty. But there
was nobody there now.
She continued to the end, crouching low in case one
of the guards was positioned on the rope bridge that
stretched high up from wall to wall. The whole fort
seemed to be abandoned. Her pulse raced. There was a
car, a very old and beaten-up Land Rover, parked right
in front of her. Incredibly, she could even see the keys in
the ignition. Surely it couldn’t be as easy as this!
It wasn’t. A young, bearded guard was standing right
next to it, leaning on the hood. There was a rifle slung over
his shoulder. To get the car, she would have to get past
him. Or she could knock him out with the bar. But she
would never be able to sneak up on him without being
heard. Sound carried too easily in the
desert evening,
particularly when surrounded by the great
silence of the
sands. Somehow she had to distract him. She had to
make him come to her.
And quickly. They’re hurting Alex. They’ve already
started.
She remembered the kitchen. It was just a few steps
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back and she darted in. She threw open the fridge and,
with a surge of relief, found what she was looking for: a
carton of eggs. Why should she have remembered this
now? It was the sight of the microwave that had done
it. A failed experiment by a ten-year-old Alex Rider. How
she had yelled at him at the time! But now she could use it.
She put one of the eggs into the microwave, swiveled
the knob to five minutes and turned it on. Then she hur-
ried back outside and hid behind the boxes. She won-
dered if it would have been sensible to have armed herself
with a kitchen knife, but the idea revolted her, and any-
way, she hadn’t seen one around. She waited, counting
the seconds. She could imagine the egg turning slowly
behind the glass door on its rotating plate. As Alex had
discovered, you can’t cook an egg that way. There was a
bang as the egg exploded, showering itself all over the
inside of the microwave.
As she had hoped, the guard had heard the noise and
came running almost immediately. He stopped at the en-
trance to the kitchen and looked inside, wondering what
had happened. That was when Jack tiptoed forward and
hit him on the back of the head with the iron bar, using
all her strength. The man grunted and fell sideways. Jack
made sure he was really unconscious, then turned and
ran for the car.
All sorts of thoughts were going through her mind.
Should she have taken the guard’s rifle? Could she make
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her way through the fort, find Alex, and take him out with
her? No—that would be too dangerous. Right now, she
had the element of surprise, but the moment she tried to
start a fight, Razim would outnumber her by a factor of
about twenty to one. She hated leaving Alex behind, but
she remembered what he had said beside the lake. Better
one of them out than neither of them. The town of Siwa
couldn’t be too far away. She would get there and come
back with reinforcements . . . the local police, the army,
whatever. And the moment Razim heard the car leaving,
as soon as he had found out what had happened, he
would stop whatever he was doing and come after her.
Alex would be all right.
She got into the car, closing the door softly behind her
so that it made no sound. There was nobody guarding the
gate. It was open with the desert and a single track
stretching out beyond. This was somehow all too good to
be true. Would the car start? She turned the key and the
engine purred into life. Nobody shouted at her. Nobody
came running.
What about the mines? Razim had said there was a
defensive circle all the way around the fort. But she re-
membered his words. They were turned on only if he
believed he was under attack. She would just have to
hope for the best. There might be other tire tracks she
could follow through the sand.
Hang on, Alex. Help is on its way.
She pushed the car into first gear and moved off.
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• • •
It took the television screen several seconds to warm up.
Alex found himself looking at a black-and-white image
that was so fuzzy, it could have been shot at night. At first
he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Julius Grief was
leering at him, waiting for him to work it out. Razim was
standing to one side, resting the remote control in his
palm. Alex thought of closing his eyes, of looking away.
Whatever these two freaks were trying to show him, it
couldn’t be good. But then he realized what was happen-
ing and knew that he was trapped, that it was already too
late.
There must have been a camera hidden somewhere
high up in Jack’s cell. Jack had her back to him, but he
could see her attacking the bar of the window with the
knife she had taken, cutting into the brickwork. Alex still
didn’t know why they were doing this, what they wanted.
But as he watched her, Razim began a soft, mocking
commentary.
“So it would seem that your friend Miss Starbright
stole a knife from the breakfast table this morning. That
was very bad of her. But shall I tell you a little secret,
Alex? I had an idea that she might. In fact, I rather wanted
her to. And she didn’t disappoint me.”
On the screen, Alex saw the bar fall out of the window.
“And there you are,” Razim continued. “Who would
have thought that someone as careful as myself would put
your friend in a cell with a metal bar just waiting to come
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loose? And how foolish of me to dismiss the guards who
usually patrol the prison block, leaving her free to wriggle
out. What could I have been thinking of?”
Alex was beginning to see where this was going. All
around him, the machines pulsed and flickered and the
needles began to twitch. Julius Grief was grinning, still
clutching the black plastic box that Razim had given him.
“Now look at that! She’s out! She’s free. And despite
all the noise she’s made, nobody has heard. I wonder if
anyone has left a car for her, to help her get away?”
There were other cameras outside. Alex saw Jack look
into the kitchen, then continue down the passageway
where a third camera picked up the main courtyard with
the waiting Land Rover.
“Just one guard,” Razim crooned. “We didn’t want to
make this too easy, did we!”
“You wanted this to happen.” Alex wasn’t sure how he
found the words. There was a terrible crushing feeling in
his chest, as if he was being scooped hollow.
“Of course. We were using a long-range listening de-
vice when you were at the lake this morning. Why else do
you think I let the two of you walk alone? It might amuse
you to know that the technology was almost exactly the
same as that water-bottle gadget you were given by Mr.
Smithers. Yes, I know about that too.” Razim moved
closer, so close that when he spoke again, Alex could feel
his breath on his cheek. “Have you not yet learned? I am
a master of manipulation. I manipulated MI6 into send-
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ing you here. I manipulated your arrival at the Cairo In-
ternational College of Arts and Education. And very soon
I will be manipulating the British government to do ex-
actly what I demand. From the start, I have been pushing
the buttons and pulling the strings. All along, you have
been dancing to my tune.”
Razim nodded at the screen. Alex watched Jack come
out of her hiding place and knock out the guard.
Julius giggled. “She thinks she’s being so clever!” he
exclaimed.
“I must say, I hadn’t expected her to injure my guard,”
Razim said. “But as to the rest of it . . . shall we tell Alex?”
“Yes!” Grief’s eyes were dancing. “Tell him!”
“There are two types of pain, Alex. Physical and emo-
tional. Up until now, my experiments have all been phys-
ical. But as I have already told you, I need you intact. So
it is emotional pain that I am measuring right now and, I
have to say, the results are already impressive.”
The needles were jumping and swaying like grass in
the wind. Pulses of light were shooting across the screens.
Alex’s entire body was tense, his hands straining at the
bonds, his eyes staring. He knew what was coming. He
had worked it out.
“Please,” he pleaded. “She has nothing to do with this.
You don’t have to hurt her.”
Jack had gotten into the car.
“Oh, but I’m afraid I do,” Razim said. “Miss Star-
bright is now sitting on thirty pounds of high explosive,”
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Razim said. “Consider the situation, Alex. She has been
with you all your life. She has sacrificed so much for your
happiness. She is, I am sure you would agree, your best
friend.”
“Leave her!” The machines had gone mad. Alex was
writhing, trying to break free.
“She is your best friend. And the remote control, the
device that will detonate the explosive, is in the hand of
someone who hates you, who has been dreaming for
more than a year of destroying you. Why don’t you speak
to him, Alex? Why don’t you ask him to take pity on you?”
On the screen, Jack had driven out of the compound.
The Land Rover was already on the track and picking up
speed.
“Please!” Alex felt hot liquid pouring out of the cor-
ners of his eyes. He couldn’t help himself. “Don’t . . .”
“I’m sorry?” Julius pushed his face into Alex’s. “I
don’t think I heard you.”
“Please, Julius. I’ll do anything you want . . .” “You’re
doing exactly what I want,” Julius said. He
was holding the remote control right in front of Alex’s
face. Alex saw his thumb press down.
The car blew up. The images weren’t black-and-white
after all. The fireball was bright red and orange at the
center. The explosion seemed to take in the entire desert
and sky. For a moment there was no image at all. Then
the cameras picked up the flaming skeleton of the car,
lying still, with fire roaring through the shattered win-
dows, and he knew that Jack Starbright was dead.
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Jack Starbright, who had looked after him since he
was seven. Who had been at his side at the funeral of his
uncle and who had tried to protect him once Ian Rider’s
secrets had taken over his life. Jack Starbright, who had
packed his books for school and taken care of his bullet
wounds, always cheerful, always on his side. Jack Star-
bright, the one person he could confide in, who under-
stood him better than anyone, and who should never have
set foot in the terrible, shadowy world that he had inher-
ited. Alex Rider’s grief burst out of him. There was no
stopping it. The tears were coursing down his cheeks. He
was howling, his whole body contorted, his eyes tightly
shut. At the same time, Julius Grief was capering about
him, laughing, while Razim examined his apparatus, tap-
ping at a keyboard, comparing different readings.
“It’s extraordinary,” he muttered. “We’ve never had
readings like this. Never. It seems that I have completely
underestimated the power of emotional pain. I may even
have to create a second scale of measurement. This is
really quite remarkable.”
Alex slumped forward, his head lolling against his
chest. He had blacked out. But still the machines sucked
out and translated his emotions . . . the computers, the
monitors, the printers, the gauges.
“Wasn’t that great!” Julius exclaimed. “Wasn’t that
cool!”
“Go to bed, Julius,” Razim replied. He picked up a
printout and held it up to examine the figures. “I have
work to do.”
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Two guards had arrived. They untied Alex and dragged
him away. Julius followed them out of the room. Razim
sat where he was, deep in thought.
Out in the desert, the flames flickered in the darkness,
throwing jagged red shadows across the sand.
20
H A L F AN I N C H
THE CONVOY WAS MOVING SWIFTLY through the streets of
Cairo. There were nine vehicles in all, starting with two
police cars and four outriders on motorbikes. The three
cars at the center of the procession were identical: over-
sized black limousines with tinted windows and a minia-
ture Stars and Stripes fluttering at the corner. The cars
had begun their journey a mile away, at the American
embassy in Garden City, and from the moment they had
swung out of the gates and onto the main road, a whole
army of Egyptian policemen had been deployed to keep
them moving, with officers holding back the traffic at
every corner and at every light. From the air, the convoy
might have looked like a living animal, a snake perhaps,
burrowing its way through a hundred thousand ants.
The secretary of state was in the first limousine. It
might have been safer for her to ride in the middle one
with CIA agents in front and behind . . . but this was also
the more obvious target. Even though the cars were
armor plated, an armor-piercing missile launched from a
rooftop was always a possibility. All the roofs had been
checked. Armed policemen had taken up strategic posi-
tions all the way along the route and would remain there
until the night was over. The man known as the Engineer
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had been seen in Cairo. He might have been killed, but
not before he had provided an assassin with a weapon.
Nothing could be left to chance.
Sitting in the backseat, next to the window, the secre-
tary of state watched the drab buildings and the station-
ary traffic as they flashed by. She was a small woman with
steely eyes and tied-back silver hair, wearing an off-white
silk jacket and skirt, a white shirt, and a jade necklace
that had been given to her by the Chinese premier on a
recent visit. There was a short, bald-headed man in a
dark suit next to her. He looked nervous, but she knew it
had nothing to do with the security arrangements. He
was her foreign policy adviser and was already thinking
about what she was going to say. It was always a danger-
ous business, making new enemies, and her speech to-
night would do just that. Her driver and bodyguard—both
CIA men—were in the front. They knew nothing. To
them, it was just another business trip.
It seemed to have gotten dark very early. It was only
half past six, but the sky was already black. It was going
to rain. The temperature had risen too high even for this
sweltering city and it was obvious that something was
going to break soon. The clouds were so heavy that they
looked as if they were about to fall out of the sky, and the
air was sticking to everything it touched. Even the air-
conditioning inside the car seemed to be fighting a losing
battle.
“It’s a pretty nasty night, Jeff,” she said. Her foreign
policy adviser’s name was Jeff Townsend.
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“Could be a downpour,” Jeff agreed.
“I thought it didn’t rain in Cairo.”
“It doesn’t rain often, ma’am. But when it rains . . . it
rains.”
The secretary of state had a headache. It had been
nagging at her ever since she had touched down in the
presidential plane. She leaned forward. “Do you have an
aspirin, Harry?”
“Sure thing, ma’am.” Her bodyguard was also a
trained medic. He handed her two pills, which she swal-
lowed with a sip of mineral water from a bottle.
The convoy crossed the Nile on University Bridge and
swept around El-Gamaa Square—actually a circular area
and one that would normally have been jammed with
traffic. It continued up a wide avenue with palm trees on
each side and lawns and fountains running up the center.
The university itself lay straight ahead. Even on a normal
day, security at the campus was high, with students pass-
ing through a single gateway and showing ID before they
were allowed to continue. But this week, security levels
had soared with triple checks, full body searches, metal
detectors, the works. The main Assembly Hall had been
in lockdown for the past twenty-four hours. Egyptian po-
lice with sniffer dogs had finished searching the place for
the fifth time just a few hours ago.
The limousine drove through the gate. White-suited
police stood at attention and saluted as it passed. And
then they were in the campus itself, with searchlights
swinging across the ground, people everywhere, helicop-
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ters hovering overhead. Even the secretary of state began
to feel a little anxious. She noticed that inside the com-
pound, the police were wearing black and carried ma-
chine guns. Of course, she was used to this. She couldn’t
even cross Washington, DC, without the same sort of
security. But she was in a strange place, far away from
home. And this thick, unnatural darkness. It felt like the
end of the world.
The driver stopped exactly where he had been told.
Even with the unpredictable Cairo traffic, everything had
been planned with such precision that the secretary of
state was only fifty seconds late. Someone ran forward
and opened the door. She got out.
She stood in front of a massive building that resem-
bled a museum, an opera house, or perhaps a library with
a million books. It stretched all the way across the main
campus, its huge dome supported by five columns with
steps that could have been purposefully designed for the
arrival of a president or a head of state. A red carpet led
the way, with crash barriers on both sides, keeping back
the crowds of journalists and photographers. There was
the usual line of important people waiting to meet her,
and the secretary of state found herself shaking hands
with politicians, academics, and businessmen . . . people
she had never met before and would never see again. A
hundred cameras flashed in the heavy heat. She felt a
drop of rain on her shoulder and looked up. A pair of
helicopters buzzed overhead, their searchlights scissoring
down.
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Around the corner from the main entrance, in a sepa-
rate space where they could be kept out of sight, a whole
fleet of brightly colored vans stood silently, feeding on the
images of the arrival. These were OBUs—Outside Broad-
cast Units—and they had been sent to record the speech
for worldwide transmission. The BBC were there, along
with Sky, CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, and news teams from all
over the Middle East, jammed together in a tangle of
thick black cables and satellite dishes. As the secretary of
state continued along the lines, shaking hands and nod-
ding at smiling faces, her image was captured on a hun-
dred television screens. The OBUs were small and packed
with equipment: monitor stacks, sound desks, vision
racks, electric generators. Some of them had two or three
producers already playing with the images, dissolving
from one to another, then cutting back to some presenter
in a studio miles away. A little girl handed the secretary
of state some flowers. The producers grabbed the mo-
ment, going in for the close-up, the reaction shot, the
applause from the crowd. This was the big speech. It had
to have a big buildup too.
The OBUs had arrived earlier in the day, filing in one
at a time through the main gate. Each one carried a spe-
cial permit on the window and every driver had shown his
ID. But the vans themselves had not been searched. They
were, after all, going to remain outside the building, and
even if a journalist or a sound engineer had wanted to
break into the Assembly Hall, it would have been com-
pletely impossible. Security was too tight. The Outside
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Broadcast Units were always there. They were part of the
event. Nobody had considered that they might represent
a threat.
But they were wrong.
One of the vans belonged to a television company
called Al Minya and had arrived with the name in bright
red letters and a pyramid logo painted on the side. It car-
ried the right permit, and the driver, dressed in white
overalls with the same red pyramid on his top pocket, had
shown what seemed to be an authentic ID. But if anyone
had decided to telephone Al Minya—which was a real
cable company—they would have been told that they
weren’t actually covering the speech. They hadn’t sent an
OBU, although, as it happened, one of their vehicles had
recently had to go in for repairs.
If they had checked the license plate, they would have
discovered that this was the missing vehicle. They might
then have discovered that the driver—shaven headed and
built like a bulldog—had never worked in television and
that his real name was Erik Gunter.
And finally, they might have searched the van and
found an English schoolboy, sitting with his arms tied
and a gag in his mouth, a prisoner, inside.
They had brought Alex Rider back from the Siwa Oasis
that afternoon, landing the Sikorsky H-34 at the same
building site where he had been taken from the Northern
Cemetery. He was wearing his Cairo College uniform
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and was securely belted in place. Without the belt, he
would have slumped forward. He seemed to be half
asleep.
Gunter was waiting with the Al Minya van when the
helicopter landed, and even he was a little surprised by
the change in the boy who had been captured forty-eight
hours before. Despite his time in the sun, Alex was an
ashen white and there was a lost, empty quality to his
eyes. When he was ordered to step down from the cabin,
he did just that, and he didn’t move as his hands were tied
up in front of him. Gunter led him into the van. Alex
stumbled briefly at the doorway, steadying himself on one
of the countertops. But he said nothing and he didn’t try
to resist. There hardly seemed any point gagging him. He
looked completely defeated.
“What have you done to him?” Gunter asked.
Julius Grief had sprung down from the helicopter and
followed them across the rubble-strewn ground. Like
Alex, he was in school uniform. “We played a little joke
on him,” he explained. “But I don’t think he enjoyed it.”
Four hours later, the Al Minya van was in its place at
the very end of the line, farthest away from the entrance
where the secretary of state had arrived. Along with all
the other OBUs, it was plugged into the main feed being
delivered by the television network inside the Assembly
Hall and received the same images as all the news chan-
nels. Julius Grief hadn’t come with them. Gunter and
Alex were alone.
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Gunter was beginning to feel unnerved by the long
silence and by the semiconscious boy sitting tied by his
arms and feet to a metal chair between two banks of
machinery. He took out his gun—it was a black, Rus-
sian-made Tokarev TT-33, the same gun that Alex had
found in his office—and laid it on the desk, within easy
reach. He had checked that the door of the OBU was
locked, but if anyone tried to come in, he wouldn’t hesi-
tate to kill them. Then he clicked open a can of Coke
and turned one of the dials on the control panel in front
of him.
“. . . and the secretary of state has just arrived, and we
can see her entering the building. The man beside her is
Jeff Townsend, who has been her foreign policy adviser
for the past two years . . .”
The voice was that of a CNN newscaster. Gunter could
see the secretary of state on one of the monitors. She was
walking down a wide corridor with officials ap- plauding
on both sides. Then the image cut to the audi- ence
waiting inside the Assembly Hall. There were two
thousand people there, sitting on three levels. Everyone
was dressed smartly, packed together in rows that curved
around in front of a stage that was decorated with a sin-
gle podium and two American flags.
From where he was sitting, Alex had a good view of
the screen. But he didn’t seem to be interested. Gunter
wondered if he even knew where he was. Well, it didn’t
matter. He glanced at his watch. The speech was due to
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start in twelve minutes. And five minutes after that, Alex
would be dead.
He stretched a hand out and turned off the sound.
“I expect you want to know what this is all about,”
Gunter said. He didn’t really care if Alex wanted to know
or not. He just felt a need to break the silence between
them.
With the gag in his mouth, Alex couldn’t talk. He
didn’t look as if he wanted to.
Gunter thought for a moment, then took out a knife,
which flicked open in his hand. “I’m going to untie you,”
he said. “Because you’ll be leaving here shortly. But if you
even try to stand up or to get out of that chair before I
give you permission, I will shoot you in the stomach. Do
you understand that?”
Alex nodded very slightly.
“Good.”
Gunter stood up and leaned over him, cutting the ropes
behind him, releasing his arms. He stepped back quickly
in case Alex tried to lash out—but the boy didn’t even
seem to be aware that he was free. Gunter cut the rest of
the cords, took off the gag, and sat down again. There was
very little space between them. The gun was right next to
him and his eyes had never left Alex’s. The different
screens inside the OBU showed pictures of the audience,
the Assembly Hall from outside, the empty stage.
“That’s better,” Gunter said. “We still have a bit of
time together and I’d quite like to explain what’s going
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on. The fact of the matter is that Scorpia has put together
a rather brilliant plan and this is where it ends—just you
and me, in this van. You get a bullet, I’m afraid. And do
you know what I get? A million dollars—just for moving
one finger half an inch.
“I’ve never actually killed a kid before, and for what
it’s worth, I don’t feel too good about it. But you see, it’s
not my fault. You don’t know anything about me, so let
me tell you. When I came out of Afghanistan . . . Do you
know how many bullets I have in me? They dug two of
them out, but there are still two of them lodged inside—
they couldn’t reach them—and they’re killing me. I can
feel them. I took those bullets for my men and I was glad
to do it. But when I got home, well, suddenly I discovered
that I wasn’t quite the hero that I thought. They put me
in a hospital in Birmingham—it was even a mixed ward,
can you believe it? I was in pain all the time. You have no
idea how much pain. But when I rang the bell, nobody
came. Sometimes I was just left there to soil the bed. It
was disgusting. And in the end, when I was able to limp
out of there, oh yes, they gave me the medal. But they
didn’t give me a decent pension. The army didn’t want to
know. I couldn’t even get a job. You know? Nobody gives
a damn about the war in Afghanistan. Nobody cares. So
when Scorpia came along, when they offered me this op-
portunity, do you think I was going to say no? A million
dollars, Alex. And too bad that I have to kill a kid. But
right now I have to look out for number one.”
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Alex didn’t speak.
Gunter leaned over and suddenly slapped him. Alex’s
head rocked backward. “Talk to me, dammit,” he said. “I
want to know what you think.”
“I don’t think anything,” Alex said.
Gunter nodded, as if this was enough. “I wonder if
you’ve ever heard of the Elgin marbles,” he went on. “Did
you ever study them in class? Or perhaps you visited
them at the British Museum. Well, believe it or not—and
this must sound very strange to you, sitting here in the
middle of Cairo—that’s what this is all about. There was
this rich Greek guy called Ariston and he wanted them
sent back to Athens. Can you believe that? He was the
one who hired Scorpia, and they’ve been playing you like
a puppet on a string . . . you and MI6. You’ve been com-
plete idiots from the very start.
“This is how it works.” Gunter tilted his watch again.
“In eleven minutes’ time, the American secretary of state
is going to begin a speech. She’ll make some general re-
marks about the Middle East . . . We’ve already seen a
draft of what she’s going to say. And then, she’ll start
talking about the balance of power in the world and how
completely and utterly useless and untrustworthy we
Brits have become. And at that moment there’ll be a shot
in the auditorium . . . a hidden assassin . . . and I’m afraid
the poor woman will be killed. There will, of course, be
an immediate panic. There are two thousand people in
there and they’ll all come stampeding out. It’s dark and it
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looks like it’s about to rain, which will help. Nobody will
have any idea what’s going on—which is exactly what we
want. Because at that moment, I’m going to kill you too.”
Gunter was about to continue, but just then an image
came up on one of the television screens and he reached
out and jabbed one of the buttons on the console, freez-
ing it. Still keeping half an eye on Alex, he turned a dial.
The image zoomed in and Alex saw exactly what he was
meant to see. A row of boys and girls in dark blue and
light blue uniforms—the politics group from the Cairo
International College of Arts and Education. The princi-
pal, Monty Jordan, was at one end of the line. Miss Wat-
son was at the other. Julius Grief was between them,
chatting to Gabriella, the daughter of the ambassador. Of
course, she would think he was Alex. He looked like Alex
and he sounded like Alex, and she hadn’t really known
him long enough to tell the difference.
“Ah—there you are!” Gunter exclaimed. “Did you ever
wonder how your name got onto the politics group? I put
it there, of course. They do lots of visits like this and there
was no way they were going to miss the American
secretary of state. Mr. Jordan got tickets for the whole
group and there you are, right in the middle of them.
“Any minute now, you’ll stand up and leave the audi-
torium. You’ll tell the principal that you’re not feeling well
and need some fresh air. You’ll slip around the back,
passing quite close to this van, as it happens. Then you’ll
go back inside through a service door, and that’s when
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the shot will be fired. And the next time anyone sees you,
you’ll be lying dead on the tarmac with a bullet in your
head.”
“You want people to think that I killed her.” It was the
first time that Alex had volunteered anything, and he
sounded almost matter-of-fact, as if he didn’t care what
happened.
“Exactly. You’ve finally worked it out. You see, Scor-
pia has been recording you and filming you for quite a
few weeks now. They’ve created a whole file about you—
the Horseman file, they call it. What’s in it? Well, there’s
a lot of information about your other missions, proving
that you’ve worked for MI6 in the past. But there’s also a
film of the day Alan Blunt and Mrs. Jones drove to see
you in Chelsea, including a recording of the entire con-
versation. With a little editing, it will prove conclusively
that they sent you to Cairo, although it won’t say why. We
even intercepted the e-mail booking that shows that MI6
paid for your flight tickets.
“And then there’s the matter of the weapon being used
to kill the secretary of state. You’ll remember that I took
several pictures of you holding it, and at the same time
you’ll have left your DNA and fingerprints all over it.
We’ve also got plenty of evidence tying you in with the
death of Mr. Habib. I was actually quite surprised that
you fell for that old trick, listening in on my telephone call
outside the school office. I knew you’d followed me to the
House of Gold. And what does everyone think? You see
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
Habib, you get the gun, and the next minute he’s dead
and the boat’s been blown up. Who did it? Well, you did,
of course.”
Gunter drank some of the Coke, then put the can down.
“So what happens now?” he went on. “The secretary
of state has been assassinated just as she was about to
start an anti-British speech. The whole of Cairo is in an
uproar. At the same time, a British schoolboy is found
dead at the scene. His classmates can testify that he was
behaving very strangely and left the Assembly Hall min-
utes before the shot was fired. Rumors begin to swirl
around. As always, there are conspiracy theories. People
say that British intelligence was involved in the shooting
and that the dead teenager was actually working for them.
Of course, they deny it. And after a few days or maybe
weeks, the press moves on and everything becomes quiet
again. It looks as if they’ve gotten away with it.
“And then Scorpia moves in with the Horseman file.
They have all the proof they need to show that in this case
the conspiracy theories are true. Alex Rider was an MI6
agent. He
was
the killer. We have photographic evidence,
forensic evidence, films, recordings, intercepts . . . and
we’ll pass the whole lot over to the Americans unless you
do exactly what we say. The British government will have
no choice! The Horseman file would quite simply blow
their country apart. It would make them the enemy of the
entire world. Can you imagine how nervous they will be,
Alex? They will be at the complete mercy of Scorpia.
What is it that we want? A billion dollars? A trillion?
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But—no! All we ask for is an announcement that the Elgin
marbles will be returned—immediately—to their correct
home. Maybe it’ll upset a few art historians and some
pompous professors, but it’s really a tiny price to pay.
“And here’s a funny thing. As it happens, the secretary
of state has Greek parentage. Her mother was born in
Athens. So the British government can announce that
they’re sending back the marbles in her honor! Everyone
will be happy. The prime minister will even be congratu-
lated on his consideration. He will see at once that he has
no choice but to agree.
“Everyone wins. I get paid. Scorpia gets paid. The
Greeks get their marbles. MI6 gets the file. The only
losers, I suppose, are the secretary of state and you. She’ll
be killed in . . .” Another turn of the watch. “In seven
minutes’ time. And you die the moment Julius Grief
gets back to this van. He’s asked to watch when I pull the
trigger, by the way. I don’t think he likes you very much.”
Gunter finished speaking and looked back at the tele-
vision screen. All the cameras were now fixed on the stage
inside the Assembly Hall, and even as he watched, a tall,
dark-haired Egyptian man appeared and began to ad-
dress the crowd in Arabic. The secretary of state was
about to walk on. Her speech was about to begin. He
turned up the volume but kept it low.
“Julius should have left by now,” Gunter said. “You
have very little time left, Alex. In a way, I feel sorry for
you. But if there’s a moral in all this, it’s that kids
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
shouldn’t get mixed up in adult affairs. You should have
known that. Now it’s too late.”
“I want something,” Alex said. His voice was neutral.
“Oh yes?” Gunter was surprised that Alex had asked
for anything at all.
“I want a cigarette.”
“A cigarette?”
“Yes.”
“When did you start smoking?”
“A year ago.”
Gunter shook his head. “It’s a bad habit. You’re too
young to smoke.”
“It’s not going to kill me now. What difference does
it make?”
“You have a point.” Gunter shrugged. “But I’m afraid
I don’t smoke. I don’t have any cigarettes.”
“There’s a pack over there.” Alex nodded at the work
surface near the door, just behind Gunter. Sure enough,
there was a pack of Black Devils—the cigarettes smoked
by Razim—lying on the surface.
Gunter glanced over his shoulder. The cigarette pack
was within easy reach. “I hope you’re not trying to trick
me,” he said. “You think you can distract my attention?
Let me assure you that I could shoot you dead before you
even realized I’d picked up the gun.”
“I don’t care what you do to me,” Alex said. “I just
want a cigarette.”
“All right. If you want the truth, Alex, I think you’re a
little pathetic. But if that really is your last wish . . .”
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Without taking his eyes off Alex, Gunter reached back
for the cigarette pack, opened it, and slid his hand inside
to take out a cigarette.
And screamed.
In half a second, all his poise and self-control had
gone. The gun was forgotten. Even Alex didn’t matter
anymore. All he was aware of was the pain blasting its
way through the palm of his hand and up his arm—all the
way to his shoulder. The pain was crippling. It was tear-
ing at his heart.
And from out of the cigarette pack crawled a mature,
angry, fat-tailed scorpion. The sting of such a creature is
not always lethal, but this one had been a prisoner inside
the cigarette pack for almost twelve hours, and in that
time it had been filling its glandular sacs with poison,
waiting for the moment when it could attack. As soon as
Gunter had opened the pack, it had struck, its barb—or
hypodermic aculeus—injecting a dose of fast-acting neu-
rotoxins into the palm of his hand. At the same instant,
Alex had come back to life, springing out of the chair and
snatching up the gun in one movement. He didn’t have
time to load it. Instead, he swung it with all his strength
into Gunter’s face. He heard the man’s nose break. With
blood spouting, still clutching his injured hand, Gunter
fell back, lost his balance, and fell. His head hit the edge
of the countertop with a sickening thud. His neck snapped
forward. He lay still.
Alex stood where he was, breathing heavily.
He had noticed the nest of scorpions outside his cell
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the day he had arrived at Siwa Oasis. With no gadgets
and no weapons, he had begun to formulate a plan long
before Jack Starbright had tried to escape. He had stolen
the cigarette pack at breakfast. He had concealed it in his
cell. And he had been awake all night—the longest night
of his life—hoping that a scorpion would reappear. The
adult had climbed in through the windows a few hours
after sunrise. Alex had managed to trap it in the cigarette
pack and had been keeping it in his pocket ever since.
He had slipped the cigarette pack into position as he
entered the OBU, pretending to stumble. It had been
there ever since.
Alex’s face had barely changed. His eyes were still far
away. But now there was a pinprick of something there,
deep inside them. Had Gunter been conscious or even
alive, he might have described it as a spark of fury. Alex
examined the gun. It was quite heavy in his hand, but he
could see that it would be fairly simple to use, with an
external hammer, no safety catch, and a detachable box
magazine in the handle holding eight bullets. It was fully
loaded. Alex slipped it into the waistband of his trousers.
He was going to need it.
There was a round of applause and Alex glanced at the
screens. The American secretary of state was walking
onto the stage. The audience had risen to its feet. Alex
took one last look at Gunter. The Scorpia man didn’t
seem to be breathing. His hand looked like a rubber glove
that someone had pumped full of air. It reminded Alex
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343
that there was an angry scorpion somewhere inside the
Outside Broadcast Unit. It was time to go.
He found the lock and slid the door open to find him-
self facing the Assembly Hall just a few yards in front of
him. It was very dark but the rain hadn’t started yet. A
blast of warm, heavy air rubbed against his face, taking
over from the air-conditioning. He could see the other
OBUs. Some of them had kept their doors open, allowing
the gray-and-white flicker of their television monitors to
escape into the night. There were no policemen or guards
in sight, and he guessed that they would either be around
the main entrance or else inside the Assembly Hall, con-
centrating on the audience and the stage.
But then a single figure flitted in front of him, keeping
close to the main wall, hurrying around the back of the
building. He was dressed in dark blue trousers and a light
blue shirt and he was breathing heavily. Somehow he must
have been delayed. Perhaps one of the CIA men had tried
to stop him from leaving the building. He wasn’t carrying
any weapon, of course. He would have been searched on
the way in and possibly on the way out too.
It was Julius Grief.
Alex slid the door of the OBU shut behind him and set
off in pursuit.
21
C A I R O S T O R M
“G
OOD EVENI N G, L ADIES AND GE NTL E MEN.
It’s a real
pleasure to find myself back in Egypt, a country that has
always been a good friend to democracy. It’s certainly
warm this evening. But it’s nothing compared with the
warmth of your welcome.”
An image of the American secretary of state was being
projected onto a vast television monitor at the back of the
stage, her head and shoulders looming over the actual
woman herself. She was standing between the two flags
with the lectern in front of her. Her opening words had
been projected onto a glass screen that stood just on the
edge of her vision, and they could be read only from her
side. In front of her, two thousand people greeted her
opening remarks with a ripple of applause that seemed to
spread out and grow, rising all the way to the dome.
The front rows and special galleries to the left and to
the right were taken up by Egyptian politicians, sheikhs,
diplomats, and businesspeople, dressed in smart suits,
bright white dishdashas, sparkling evening dresses, and
jewelry. In the far distance, three tiers up, the spectators
at the very back were little more than gray smudges in the
shadows. Security men stood at every door and at inter-
vals along the aisles, watching not the secretary of state
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345
but the people watching her. All the exits had been closed
moments before she had begun to speak. Nobody would
be allowed in until she had finished. And—unless there
was an emergency—nobody would be allowed to leave.
The lights in the halls had been dimmed, but there
were spotlights focused on the stage, trapping the speaker
in a perfect white circle. The light and sound levels were
being controlled by two technicians in a sealed-off cabin
with a plate glass window constructed underneath the
first circle. But most of the machinery, including the pro-
jection equipment for the plasma TV, was actually con-
cealed much higher up. A winding staircase led all the
way from the ground floor, following the curve of the
dome. At the top there was a low, arched doorway lead-
ing into an area packed with fuses, circuit boards, and
temperature gauges. This second control room had been
built into the ceiling at the very center of the dome and
slightly resembled the cockpit of a spaceship: completely
circular with narrow slits that would have given someone
a bird’s-eye view of the stage—if they had been allowed
inside.
The room had been quickly identified as a grade-one
security risk, an ideal position for a would-be assassin. It
had been thoroughly searched—not once but several
times. The door was locked from outside and a CIA man
had been in position, sitting there on his own, since nine
o’clock that morning. He was there now, trying to listen
to the speech, which sounded muffled and distant. He
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
was bored. When Joe Byrne had named the protection
details and started handing out jobs, he had certainly
drawn the short straw.
The CIA agent couldn’t have known that the weapon
that was going to be used to kill the secretary of state, the
L96A1 Arctic Warfare sniper rifle, was already in place
and that Julius Grief, who had been trained as a sharp-
shooter since the age of nine, was already on his way to
collect it. In a few minutes’ time, he would take his place
behind the door and the moment the secretary of state
uttered the word Britain for the first time, he would fire,
sending a .300 Winchester Magnum bullet traveling at
850 meters per second into her head.
Far below, she was already developing her theme.
“The theme of my talk this evening is friendship. Who
are the long-term partners, who can we still trust in a
rapidly changing world?”
Her voice rang out, echoing around the great Assem-
bly Hall. The words scrolled, line by line, up the Plexiglas
teleprompter. Another page of general introduction. Then
she would read the word that would spell out her death.
Alex Rider watched as Julius Grief crept around the side
of the building, doing his best to keep out of sight on the
other side of the parked cars and OBUs. The other boy
was close enough for him to make out the light brown
hair, the pale skin, and even his intense, cold-blooded
gaze. But Julius hadn’t noticed him. He was in too much
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347
of a hurry, making up for lost time, and his attention was
fixed on the way ahead, stepping over the cables that were
strewn along the tarmac. Alex followed. He could feel the
heat of the night bearing down on him. It was as if he
were carrying the whole weight of the world on his shoul-
ders, as if the coming storm were trying to pound him
down.
On the other side of the wall, a major international
speech was being delivered by the second-most powerful
politician from the United States. Her words were about
to cause a political firestorm. And here, out in the dark-
ness, two identical twins were stalking each other, one of
them with murder on his mind. What would a security
guard have made of it? But there were no closed-circuit
TV cameras back here, and there didn’t seem to be any-
one around apart from the television crews, locked up in
their steel boxes. Why should there have been? There was
surely only one way into the Assembly Hall and that was
around at the front.
And yet . . .
Alex saw the open door even as Julius began to make
his way toward it. That was insanity. The whole place was
crawling with police and security men. After all the prep-
aration and with the speech meaning so much, were the
authorities just going to let anyone stroll in?
Julius disappeared through the doorway. Alex allowed
a few seconds to pass, but before he could sprint across
the open space and go in himself, the worst happened
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and two armed soldiers suddenly appeared, walking
around the corner, talking together. Alex ducked behind
one of the parked cars, waiting for them to move on. But
they didn’t seem to be in any hurry. They were standing
right outside the door—it didn’t seem to bother them that
it was open—and had chosen this moment to have a
coffee. Alex saw one of them produce a flask of Arabic
coffee with paper cups and passed it to the other. Both of
them drank. Alex was so close that he even caught the
smell of the coffee in the heavy air.
What should he do? Julius Grief would be well on
his way to his position, wherever that might be. Eleven
minutes—that was what Gunter had said—and at least
six of them must have already passed. Alex was tempted
to make himself known, to raise the alarm. But he knew
it would do no good. The soldiers would probably speak
little or no English. Even if they did, it was unlikely they
would believe a fifteen-year-old boy. He would be ar-
rested and dragged out of the area and by the time he had
spoken to someone in authority, the American secretary
of state would be dead.
Of course, Scorpia’s plan would still have failed. Alex
would be able to prove that he hadn’t been involved and
the so-called Horseman file would be useless. But that
wasn’t enough. In the confusion, after the shot had been
fired, Julius Grief might escape. Razim had already said
that he was planning to slip away to another country. Alex
had already decided. That wasn’t going to happen.
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349
He looked around him, searching for a stone, a brick,
anything heavy. It was hard to see in the darkness, but he
noticed a shard of light glinting off a steel nut that must
have come unscrewed from a piece of equipment. Alex
reached out and took it, balancing it in the palm of his
hand. Yes. It would do. He twisted around and threw it
with all his strength. The nut arced through the darkness
and hit the side of a car, denting the metalwork. The
noise was loud enough to make the two soldiers jump. At
once, they hurried forward to see what had happened.
Alex watched them go past, then darted over to the door.
He didn’t need to be careful anymore. Julius Grief would
be well ahead of him by now. The real worry was that he
might already be too late.
And now he understood why no one had shown any
interest in the open door. It led into a narrow service
room, hardly more than a corridor, illuminated by two
bare lightbulbs dangling on wires. There were a couple of
metal buckets and a mop, some empty crates, and, about
five yards away, a brick wall with a row of hooks and a
pair of dirty overalls hanging above the floor. Some old
furniture—folding chairs and filing cabinets—had been
stored on one side. A row of very old, dusty fuse boxes
lined the other. It was nothing more than a dead end. The
corridor went nowhere.
Alex would have moved on. He would have thought
he’d made a mistake. But he recognized the room. He
had seen it in one of the photographs in Gunter’s desk.
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
He stepped inside. Julius Grief had definitely come in
here—but how could he possibly have disappeared? Alex
had watched him come in here. He had been watching the
entrance ever since. There were no other doors; there was
no other way out. If Julius had slipped back out again,
Alex would have seen him.
The hooks.
It seemed like years ago that Alex had been in the of-
fice at Cairo College. Razim had boasted that he had ma-
nipulated Alex from the start—but breaking in had surely
been the one thing that he couldn’t have foreseen. Razim
had arranged for him to come to the school. The fake
telephone call had led him to the House of Gold. But
nobody could have guessed that he would use one of
Smithers’s gadgets to get into the office. And so it surely
followed that whatever he had found in the secret drawer
must actually mean something. It hadn’t been left there
for him to find.
The newspaper—the Washington Post—must have
been reporting the visit of the secretary of state. The pic-
tures of the Assembly Hall . . . that was where her speech
was taking place. This room. And the photograph of a
hook shaped like a swan’s neck. It was identical to the
ones he was looking at now.
Alex had moved forward even before he had arrived at
the end of his thought process. He reached out and
grabbed one of the hooks, then another. He was expect-
ing them to twist and turn, but in fact the third one pulled
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351
down like an oversized switch. He heard a click and a
section of the wall swung open, revealing a metal stair-
case constructed between two solid concrete walls, so
narrow that he would have to turn sideways to climb it.
At once he understood the cleverness of Scorpia’s
plan. How do you put an assassin inside a building that
will be surrounded, searched from top to bottom, kept
under constant surveillance, and locked up for twenty-
four hours? Answer—you build a secret passage weeks or
months before your target arrives. Alex had no doubt at
all that the sniper rifle had been concealed here, ready for
Julius Grief to find and to carry up with him. No won- der
he had been empty-handed when he had gone in. All he
had to do was pick it up, climb to a good vantage point,
and fire. He wouldn’t even have to leave if he didn’t want
to. He could stay completely hidden for days.
Alex was already climbing the staircase, which had
been built between the inner and outer shell of the As-
sembly Hall in a space that might have been used for
pipework or perhaps to help with the circulation of cool
air. There were no lights, and after about ten steps away
from the secret opening, he was plunged into blackness.
Presumably Julius had brought a flashlight. But Alex
didn’t need to see. The staircase was made out of metal
slabs, each one placed at a regular interval so that pro-
vided he kept the same rhythm, moving his feet the same
distance, he wouldn’t stumble or fall. The walls on either
side helped too, keeping him wedged in place. He was
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S C O R P I A R I S I N G
completely blind, but it didn’t matter. He knew where he
was going and what he had to do.
He continued up, knowing from the ache in his legs
that the staircase was taking him all the way to the top of
the Assembly Hall. He felt himself curving around and
guessed that he was inside the dome. He hadn’t been
counting but he knew he must have climbed at least two
hundred steps. How much time had it taken? That didn’t
matter, provided he wasn’t already too late.
He saw light at the same time as he heard a voice—a
woman speaking in an American accent, a long way away,
as if on the other side of a curtain.
“. . . the United States has always valued its special
relationships with countries all over the world. However,
I believe that with the shift in global power, we have to
look at those relationships again . . .”
Alex reached into his waistband and drew out the To-
karev TT-33 that he had taken from Gunter. Clutching it
in his hand, he edged forward. Part of him was screaming
at him to hurry. But at the same time he knew he could
make no noise. He was moving toward an entrance . . .
not a door but a jagged opening cut into the brickwork,
barely big enough to crawl through. The light was flicker-
ing, as if projected from a television screen.
“One country in particular has, in my view, failed to
move forward with the times . . .”
Alex looked through the doorway and saw Julius Grief
lying on his stomach with the sniper rifle that Alex himself
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had once handled pressed against his shoulder, the tip of
the barrel resting on a narrow, slitlike window at floor
level. Julius was wearing latex gloves . . . He wouldn’t
leave his own fingerprints on the stock or the trigger.
“That country is our friend and will remain our friend.
But I think it is time to recognize that it no longer has
very much influence on international affairs . . .”
The control room was completely circular, like an up-
turned bowl, and looked as if it hadn’t actually been used
for years. It had a shabby gray carpet, banks of old ma-
chinery, pulleys and wheels, electric generators, and tin
boxes that might contain air-conditioning units. All of
these were connected by a tangle of pipes and cables.
Julius was lying with his feet toward Alex. Looking over
his shoulder, out the window, Alex saw what he was aim-
ing at: a huge head, a smart-looking woman with silver
hair. No. That was the television screen. The actual target
was much smaller, standing in front of it, leaning on a
lectern. The secretary of state. He could imagine the
crosshairs in the scope centering on her head.
“We all know which country I’m referring to . . .”
Alex saw Julius tighten his grip on the rifle and knew
that the moment had come and that he had to act.
“Julius!” he shouted.
On the stage, the woman heard the shout. It had bro-
ken through the silence of the auditorium. She paused
and looked up.
Julius Grief reacted with incredible speed. He had
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been about to fire at his target, but instead he whipped
around like an injured snake, turning the gun on Alex.
Alex ducked back into the darkness as Julius fired, the
sound of the bullet explosive in the small space. The gun-
shot was incredibly loud—purposefully so. It had always
been part of Scorpia’s plan to cause panic, to help Julius
and Gunter to make their escape.
The secretary of state never uttered the word Britain.
Her security men were already on the stage, rushing to-
ward her, forming a protective human shield, covering
every angle. In an instant, she had disappeared from
sight. It took the audience a few more seconds to realize
what had happened. The people in the front seats were
the first to get to their feet, pushing sideways, fighting
with each other in their hurry to get out. Panic spread like
some incredible virus, rippling in every direction, trans-
forming the crowd which seconds before had been seated
and silent into a seething, surging mass.
Grief’s first bullet had missed Alex, smashing into the
brickwork above his head even as he had pulled back.
Instantly, he reloaded. Alex had misjudged his own move-
ment. Either a piece of broken pipe or a part of the wall—
it was impossible to tell in the darkness—had jabbed into
his right arm, sending a bolt of pain all the way up to his
shoulder, numbing him. He was forced to waste precious
seconds recovering, then lunged back into the control
room, knowing that the narrow entrance would slow him
down and that Julius would have the advantage over him.
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Sure enough, as he reentered the circular chamber, he
saw that Julius had already reloaded and that the gun was
aimed directly at him, no more than a few feet away. At
this range, it would be impossible to miss. He saw death
in the other boy’s eyes.
And then the door—the real door to the room—flew
open and the CIA man who had been standing guard
burst in. He was young, in his twenties, with the same
clean-cut, boyish looks that all the agents seemed to
share. There was a gun clasped in his hands. He had
taken up a stance with his legs apart, ready to fire.
For two or maybe three seconds, nobody did anything.
Julius and Alex had been aiming at each other. The agent
was right between them. He had a gun in his hand but
didn’t know which way to turn it. It was obvious to him
that there had been a major security breach, but what he
was seeing didn’t make any sense. He was looking at two
boys, identically dressed in some sort of school uniform,
identical to each other in every way. All his training and
years of experience in the field hadn’t prepared him for
anything like this.
It was the weapon that decided him. Someone had
just taken a shot at the secretary of state, and although
one of these kids had a pistol, the other was holding a
rifle. He must be the enemy. The agent brought his gun
around. Julius did the same and he was the first to fire.
The bullet smashed into the man’s chest, throwing him
back toward Alex. The two of them fell backward. The
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dead man was on top of him, pinning him down but at
the same time shielding him from any further shots. Ju-
lius realized he had run out of time. He had to leave. He
threw the rifle down and ran out the door that the agent
had opened. Alex clambered to his feet and went after
him.
This was the real service staircase. It was made up of
wide concrete slabs with white-painted walls and it was
lit by a series of neon strips. Alex took the steps three at
a time. He was fairly certain that Julius was unarmed. If
he’d had another gun on him, he’d have surely tried to
use it. The real danger was that once the other boy
reached the bottom, he would all too easily lose himself
in the crowd. Alex knew that there were two thousand
people down below, surging out into the night. If Julius
got too far ahead of him, he would disappear in seconds
and Alex was grimly determined—he was going to end
this tonight.
The staircase emerged on the far side of the building,
away from the OBUs, with the main gates visible ahead.
Alex burst out into a scene of pure chaos. There were
people everywhere, scattering across the ornamental
lawns. Tourist police were shouting at them, blowing
whistles, waving frantically with gloved hands, but every-
one was ignoring them. More police cars were arriving
with lights stabbing at the darkness, sirens adding to the
confusion. Here and there, Alex caught sight of security
men, Americans, shouting into their throat mikes, barely
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able to hear a word. The night was thicker than ever and
the Assembly Hall loomed over them, massive and swol-
len, like a bomb about to go off. Alex sucked in the warm
air. He was already sweating. It was like being inside a
gigantic oven.
Where was Grief? Alex searched for him, trying to
pick out the blue uniform from the swirl of suits and
cocktail dresses. There was no sign of the other students
from Cairo College, but they could have been anywhere.
A voice erupted in Arabic, speaking through a bullhorn.
It was accompanied by an electric whine of static. Where
was he? Alex was afraid that he was too late, that he had
already got away.
And then he saw a movement out of the corner of his
eye that somehow didn’t fit into the pattern of fear and
people taking flight. A flash of blue colliding with white.
There he was! Julius had attacked one of the tourist po-
lice. Why would he want to do that? Alex watched the
man go down with a knee in his solar plexus and saw
Julius sweep something up from the edge of the lawn.
Now he understood. Julius had decided to arm himself
and he had taken the lightweight Vzor 27 pistol that is
standard-issue to the Egyptian police. Well, that made
two of them. Alex was still holding the Tokarev and he
gripped it more tightly, balancing it in the palm of his
hand. The chase had become more dangerous, but some-
how it felt right. After all, the two of them were meant to
be identical. Well, now they were.
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He set off in pursuit. Julius must have sensed he was
coming because he suddenly twisted around, and al-
though they were a good sixty feet apart, separated by
hundreds of people racing in every direction across the
campus, their eyes locked. Alex wondered if Julius was
going to shoot it out right here—but the other boy was in
no mood for a fight. He had a policeman lying uncon-
scious at his feet and it wouldn’t be long before others
noticed. With something like a snarl, he turned and began
to run.
Alex went after him. He wasn’t even trying to hide his
own gun. The police and security men might be looking
for a would-be assassin, but they would barely glance
twice at a teenager in school uniform. Julius was getting
close to the gate, burrowing through the crowd, using his
elbow and fist to strike out at anyone who got in his way.
Alex seemed to be moving more slowly, taking his time.
But the distance between them remained the same and he
knew, with a cold certainty, that he wasn’t going to let the
other boy slip out of his sight.
Julius was through. On the other side of the gates
there was a wide, circular parking area with dozens of
hawkers, taxi drivers, more policemen, and soldiers, some
of whom still seemed unsure what exactly had taken
place. A long avenue with fountains and statues led down
to the main road, but the traffic had tied itself into an
impossible knot with everyone trying to get away. As Alex
reached the gate, he felt something hard hit him on the
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shoulder and wondered if someone had struck him from
behind. He turned briefly but there was no one there.
Behind him, the Assembly Hall was lit by huge spotlights,
bathed in a brilliant white glow. There were still people
pouring out between the great pillars, surging toward him.
He was hit again, this time on the head, and felt water
trickling down the side of his face. Now he understood.
The storm was finally breaking. The first raindrops—as
big as bullets—were already falling. He looked up in time
to see a flash of lightning with all the power of the uni-
verse come scorching across the Cairo skyline. At the
same moment, there was a roll of thunder so loud, it was
as if the whole world had split in two. Then the rain came
down in earnest.
It was incredible—a vertical flood. Within five sec-
onds, Alex was completely drenched. The rain washed
through his hair, swept over his shoulders and down into
his shirt. He felt it coursing over his lips and into his
mouth. It half blinded him. But he ignored it. Julius might
think that the rain was on his side, that it would help to
conceal him. Alex was going to prove him wrong.
The traffic, which had been barely moving, shuffling
forward in fits and starts, had come to a complete halt.
The cars were deluged. Windshield wipers that hadn’t
been used in months were being pushed into life, slug-
gishly sweeping curtains of water off the glass. Windows
were being wound up, sunroofs desperately fastened.
And still the drivers were beeping, as if they could some-
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how persuade the bad weather to go away. Alex pressed
forward, feeling the water surging over his ankles. The
roads in Cairo have no drains. Already the cars seemed to
be sitting in the middle of a river. There was a second
blinding burst of lightning. The rain hammered down.
Julius was weaving between the stationary cars. Where
was he going? Gunter had said that he was returning to
the OBU. He had wanted to be there when Alex died.
That plan was no longer open to him, but maybe there
was a second getaway car out there, a driver waiting to
take him to the helicopter. Alex quickened his pace. He
had reached the line of traffic himself now. He moved
past the cars, glimpsing the figures inside, almost invisi-
ble on the other side of the rain-soaked glass.
A gunshot. Alex wasn’t even aware that Julius had
fired, but he heard the bullet twang into the side of a gray
Peugeot and saw the dent appear in the bodywork. In-
side, the driver and two passengers screamed and threw
themselves down. God knows what it must have sounded
like for them, with the rain already pounding down on the
roof. Perhaps they thought they’d just been struck by
lightning. There was another shot and the side mirror of
the car next to Alex exploded. Alex didn’t even try to
dodge the bullets. He lifted his own weapon, water drip-
ping off the muzzle and the back of his hand. It occurred
to him that from the day he had first joined MI6, he had
wanted a gun, but he had never been allowed to have one.
Well, that had all changed now. Blunt and Mrs. Jones
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were nowhere near. This was between him and Julius
Grief.
Julius had ducked out of sight, but suddenly he reap-
peared, running from one side of the road to the other,
firing twice more. The windshield of a white van shat-
tered and the driver must have panicked with his foot on
the accelerator, because the vehicle shot forward, smash-
ing into the car in front. A man got out of the second car,
rising into the rain in front of Alex, already shouting in
Arabic. Julius fired again and the man spun sideways, a
flower of blood sprouting out of his shoulder. Alex saw
him slump down beside his car, his face white. The driver
of the van was staring out, terrified. The beeping was
louder than ever. Alex held his pistol out in front of him.
Julius had fired four, maybe five times. He couldn’t have
many bullets left.
There were only half a dozen cars between them now.
The two of them were like duelists, trapped in a long line
of traffic that stretched out as far as the eye could see, in
front of them, behind them, all around them. Water was
streaming off Alex’s hair, pouring down in front of his
eyes. He could feel it dripping off his chin. His shoes were
full of water. His clothes had turned into sodden rags. He
wiped his eyes with the back of his arm, then took aim
and fired for the first time. The trigger moved easily—the
half inch that Gunter had described—but he was shocked
by the noise as the bullet detonated, the way the Tokarev
recoiled, almost dislocating his wrist. His
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bullet slanted uselessly into the air. A woman in a burka
stared at him from behind the window of a four-by-four.
Her eyes—all he could see of her—were full of outrage.
He had been standing close to her when he fired. This
was the middle of a city. You couldn’t start a gunfight
here!
But even if Alex had missed, the shot had an effect.
Julius took flight, ducking behind the traffic, trying to
find a way of escape. Alex saw him cross from one side of
the road to the other, in front of one car, behind another,
disappearing behind an open-back truck. There was a
park over to one side and next to it a sign advertising the
Cairo Zoo. He leapt over the barrier in the middle of the
road, past one line of traffic. Perhaps he thought that the
trees and bushes would give him shelter.
He was in the outer lane, almost at the grass verge,
when the taxi hit him. This was the only lane where the
traffic was moving—heading toward the university. The
taxi hadn’t been doing more than ten miles per hour, but
it was enough. It struck Julius on his left thigh and shoul-
der, sending him spinning into the darkness. Alex saw
him fall, then get up again, then fall a second time like a
wounded animal. The driver didn’t stop. He might not
have realized what he’d done. Or he could have seen the
gun that Julius was holding. Either way, he didn’t want to
get involved.
Alex stepped over the barrier and made it over to the
other side. Now he was on grass. Was it his imagination
or was the rain already thinning out? It had been falling
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so heavily that there simply couldn’t be much more of it
left in the sky. He crossed the pavement and walked onto
the lawn. Julius had vanished from sight, but Alex knew
he couldn’t have gone far. He wasn’t walking anymore.
He was crawling.
Alex found him stretched out on the grass, next to a
flower bed. He was cradling his injured shoulder with the
gun lying next to him. He had cut himself badly in the
collision with the taxi—there was blood oozing through
his shirt. His hair was plastered across his forehead. His
eyes were wide and staring. Alex walked up to him and
stood looming over him. The traffic was behind them.
The university campus and the Assembly Hall were sud-
denly a long way away. They were on their own.
“Are you going to kill me?” Julius screamed. He didn’t
sound afraid. His voice was on the edge of hysteria. “Are
you going to shoot me?”
Alex said nothing. The Tokarev was at his side, point-
ing down.
Julius drew a breath. It seemed to Alex that he couldn’t
have stood up, even if he’d wanted to. “What happened
to Gunter?” he asked. “Don’t tell me he let you go!”
“Gunter is dead,” Alex said.
“And you think you’ve won? You’ve saved the boring
secretary of state and everyone is going to be all over
you? ‘Good old Alex has done it again!’ But it’s not like
that, is it?” Julius writhed on the grass. His shoulder
might have been dislocated. There was a lot of blood,
mixing with the rain. “You’re not going to shoot me,” he
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sniggered. “You can’t shoot me. You don’t have it in you.
You’re just a goody-goody. Alex Rider, the reluctant spy.
And I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Very soon the
police are going to come and they’ll send me back to
prison, but—you know?—prison isn’t that bad. It’s just
like being at school. And they can’t keep me there forever.
They’ll wait five years or ten years and then they’ll set me
free.
“But you’re never going to be free, are you, Alex? Not
after what we’ve done to you. We’ve taken away the one
thing that mattered to you. We’ve killed your best friend.
Do you think she knew what had happened when the
bomb went off? Do you think she died at once? You’ll be
asking yourself that question for the rest of your life, and
from now on you’ll always be on your own. No parents.
No friends. No Jack. Nothing.
“And look at you now! I can see how much you hate
me . . .”
“You’re wrong,” Alex said. “You’re nothing to me.”
The rain was a mask, hiding his face. His eyes were
dark and empty. In his sodden clothes, he was almost a
skeleton of himself. He turned and began to walk away.
That was when Julius went for the gun, his hand
scrabbling through the wet grass. He lifted it and aimed.
Alex heard him. Some tiny movement. Some instinct.
He spun around.
Julius fired a single shot.
But Alex fired first.
22
S E L K E T
THE GR AY CHEVROLET SWEPT into the university cam-
pus and pulled up in front of the Assembly Hall. Joe Byrne
stepped out into a scene of chaos.
He had been less than half a mile away, at the Four
Seasons Hotel, watching the speech on television, when
the shot was fired and his evening suddenly became very
unpleasant indeed. It was extremely unlikely that an as-
sassin could have slipped into the Assembly Hall with the
crowd. It was almost impossible that he or she could have
carried a gun. Not if he had done his job properly. His
BlackBerry was already buzzing as he stormed out to the
waiting car. Of course, the journey had been endless. It
would have been faster to walk.
And now here he was in the damp and the darkness,
trying to get answers to questions he should never have
had to ask. It had stopped raining as suddenly as it had
started, but there were still huge puddles everywhere. At
least it was a little less hot.
His second-in-command, a man named Brenner, had
seen him arrive and came over to him. The man was ex-
perienced, a former marine, and he didn’t waste any time.
“We have two fatalities, sir. I’m afraid Edwards
was shot dead outside the room where the sniper was
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concealed. It was some sort of control center high up in
the roof. And they’ve found a TV technician in one of the
OBUs. Cause of death is still unclear.”
“What about the secretary of state?”
“She’s fine, sir. We put the usual protocol into place
and got her out of the building, unharmed. She’s already
back at the embassy, a little shaken up but otherwise okay.”
“The weapon?”
“Arctic Warfare sniper rifle. The Egyptians are hang-
ing on to it, sir. Their man’s already here.”
The Egyptians! Joe Byrne was looking old and tired—
as if all the cares of the world had been dumped on his
shoulders, which, in a way, they had. If he wasn’t careful,
this whole thing would disintegrate into a who-did-what
spat, with each country blaming the other. An armed as-
sassin had walked past fifteen CIA agents and ten times
as many Egyptian security men and police. That meant
an awful lot of egg on an awful lot of faces.
As if on cue, a short, dark man with heavy eyes and a
mustache drooping all the way down the sides of his chin
came striding toward them. Byrne recognized him at
once. His name was Ali Manzour and he was the head of
Jihaz Amn al Daoula, the Egyptian State Security Ser-
vice. He was wearing a white striped suit and there were
several heavy gold rings on his fingers. Byrne noticed that
the Egyptian’s clothes were drenched and he wondered if
it was the rain. It was just as likely to be sweat. For a man
of his size, Manzour was seriously overweight.
S e l k e t
367
Even so, it was good news that he was here. Byrne
knew Manzour fairly well. He was smart and efficient.
Over a glass of raki he could also be warm and good-
humored. But right now, his stress levels were out of con-
trol. Even as he approached, he took out a bottle of white
tablets and dry-swallowed a handful of them.
“This is a disgrace,” he exploded. “This is an outrage!”
“You told me the building was secure.” Byrne had de-
cided to play it straight down the line. The buck stops
here . . . and not with me. “The
building was secure!”
“There was some sort of secret staircase constructed
in the walls,” Brenner said. “It led all the way up.”
“I know nothing about this secret staircase!” Manzour
exclaimed. “But I am telling you now that this is a British
plot. In my opinion, it has all the fingerprints of the Brit-
ish secret service. The gun that the sniper used is of Brit-
ish design. The British did not wish the secretary of state
to make this speech. And it is a British citizen who was
found in the television van.”
“How do you know that?”
“We have his ID. His name is Erik Gunter. And he
does not work for Al Minya. The van had been stolen
from them. They know nothing about him.”
Erik Gunter. Byrne’s heart sank. It was the name that
Alex had given him. He had given instructions for the
man to be kept under surveillance, but somehow he must
have slipped through the net. “How did he die?” he asked.
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Manzour’s eyes bulged almost comically, as if he
couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “My people say
that he was stung by a scorpion. But this is madness.
There are no scorpions in Cairo. There are no scorpions
in television broadcasting vans.” He signaled frantically
and a junior officer came running over with a folding
chair. He plumped himself down and took out a handker-
chief, using it to wipe his brow. It took him a few mo-
ments to regain his composure, but when he spoke again
it was in a softer voice. “I do not understand any of this.
I get the sense of a great conspiracy. Let us give thanks
that it does not seem to have worked and that the secre-
tary of state is unharmed.”
A soldier appeared, walking hastily toward them. He
stopped in front of Manzour, saluted, then bent forward
and whispered a few words. Manzour looked up, his face
filled with new alarm. “The business becomes even more
strange,” he said. “I have just been told that a boy has
been arrested at the main gate.”
“A boy?”
“He was carrying a gun. Russian manufacture. It ap-
pears to have been fired. He simply walked up to my men
and allowed himself to be taken. He didn’t try to resist.
And now he is asking for you.”
“Where is he?” Suddenly Byrne knew. It couldn’t be
anyone else. “Can you ask your man to describe him?”
Manzour turned to the soldier and there was a brief
exchange of words. “He is a British schoolboy. Aged fif-
S e l k e t
369
teen. Light-colored hair. He was wearing the uniform of
one of our international colleges.”
“The Cairo College of Arts and Education?”
“Yes.” Manzour’s eyes narrowed. “You know him?”
“Yes, I do. And it’s absolutely urgent that we speak to
him immediately . . . somewhere private.”
Manzour nodded. He stood up, then noticed the sol-
dier, still waiting for instructions. “You heard what he
said!” he bellowed. “Fetch the boy. Bring him to me . . .
in the director’s office. Nobody is to speak to him. Not
even his name! I’ll see him at once.”
It was Alex Rider, of course. It couldn’t have been anyone
else. But Joe Byrne was shocked by what he saw. Only a
few days had passed since the two of them had met, but
in that time the boy seemed to have aged ten years. Alex
didn’t seem to be physically hurt. He had walked into the
room, an office inside the Assembly Hall, and sat down
without limping or showing any obvious sign of injury.
He had seemed pleased to see Byrne. But he looked hag-
gard and exhausted. His clothes, soaking wet, hung off a
body that was almost broken. The light had gone out in
his eyes. It was obvious to Byrne that something terrible
had happened. And for the first time in his long career
with the CIA, he was almost afraid to ask.
Alex told his story briefly, as if he wanted to get it over
with as quickly as possible. He explained that he had been
kidnapped by a man called Razim and taken to the desert.
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There was a conspiracy, put together by Scorpia, to
blackmail the British government. An exact look-alike of
Alex had entered the Assembly Hall with the party from
Cairo College and would have shot the secretary of state
if Alex hadn’t stopped him.
“A look-alike?” Manzour repeated the words. From
the expression on his face, he hadn’t believed anything
Alex had said.
“Yes. His name is Julius Grief. His father was Dr.
Hugo Grief. He had plastic surgery that made him look
like me.”
“And where is he now?”
“You’ll find him on the side of the road leading down
from the university.”
“Alive?”
“No. I killed him.”
Manzour turned to one of his officers and snapped out
a command in Arabic. The officer hurried out of the
room.
Byrne waited until he had gone. “I don’t think you
should doubt anything Alex says, Ali,” he muttered. “I
know him. I’ve worked with him twice in the past. You
can trust him.”
The use of his first name signaled something to the
Egyptian head of security. He nodded slowly, then turned
back to Alex, examining him more carefully. “We found
a dead man in an outside broadcast van,” he said.
Alex nodded. “That was Erik Gunter. He was part of
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371
it. He was the head of security at Cairo College. But he
was also working for Scorpia.”
“He was stung by a scorpion.”
“That’s right.” Alex didn’t offer any explanation.
Byrne leaned forward. “Tell me,” he said. “Where can
we find this man . . . Razim?”
“I’ll tell you that,” Alex said. “But there’s a condition.
I want to come with you when you take him out.”
Manzour shook his head. “Out of the question. I have
men who are experienced in this sort of thing. Unit Triple
Seven. They do not need your help.” Unit 777 was the
Egyptian counterterrorism and special operations unit. It
had gotten its name from the year it was founded—1977.
It was based in southern Cairo.
“I think you’ve done enough, Alex,” Byrne agreed.
“You can leave this to us.”
Alex shook his head. “Razim is in a fort near the town
of Siwa,” he said. “And he has enough firepower to hold
back an army. He’s put mines in the sand all around him
so even if your men are experienced, they’ll be blown to
pieces before they get anywhere near. Razim boasted to
me about radar warning systems and surface-to-air mis-
siles. Do you really want to get into a fight with him? If
you let me help you, you won’t have to.”
Neither man spoke, so Alex went on.
“There’s a helicopter waiting to take Julius Grief back
to the fort. I can show you where it is and you’ll be able
to hide twelve of your men inside. If we move fast enough,
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we might be able to catch Razim before he’s heard what
happened here tonight. I can walk right in. He’ll think
I’m Julius.”
“And then?” Manzour was suddenly interested. “Your
men wait in the helicopter. There’s a central
control room. If I can get in there, I can disable all the
machinery in the fort. No power. No missiles. No mines.
Then you attack. He still has about twenty or thirty
guards, but you’ll take them by surprise.”
“Everything depends upon your being able to reach
this control room,” Manzour said.
“It’s in an old bakery. I noticed it when I was there.
That’s the weak spot.”
There was a brief silence, then Byrne nodded. “He’s
right,” he said. “The question is—is it too late for a news
blackout?”
“The television stations have already broadcast that an
attempt was made on the life of your secretary of state,”
Manzour replied. “But they have not reported if it was
successful. I can make sure that they say nothing more
tonight. That would give you the time you need.”
“So it’s agreed?”
There was a movement at the door and the officer
whom Manzour had sent out returned, chattering excit-
edly in Arabic. He was staring at Alex as if he had just
seen a ghost. Manzour nodded and dismissed him. “It’s
true about the other boy,” he said. “He’s an exact dupli-
cate . . . apart from the bullet hole in his head.”
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373
Alex shrugged.
Manzour glanced at Byrne. “What do you think?”
“A
joint American-Egyptian operation. It’s your coun-
try, but it was our politician. Six of your men. Six of mine.
Plus Alex, of course.”
“I agree. But we must move quickly.”
Byrne reached out and put a hand on Alex’s shoulder.
He had to know. “What did Razim do to you, Alex?” he
asked.
He felt Alex flinch, as if the contact was painful to
him. He didn’t answer Byrne’s question. “Razim has an
interest in pain,” he said. “I think it’s time he experienced
some.” He stood up. “We shouldn’t be sitting here talk-
ing. We should be on our way. And there is one other
thing.
“This time, I want a gun.”
The Sikorsky H-34 was waiting exactly where Alex had
said it would be, sitting in the darkness beside a half-built
office block. The pilot didn’t even see them coming. One
moment he was sitting in the cockpit, waiting for Erik
Gunter and Julius Grief, the next he had been dragged
out and found himself spread-eagled on the rubble with
a gun pressed into the back of his neck.
A signal was given and four jeeps pulled in. Alex was
in the first, sitting next to Joe Byrne. There were a dozen
men behind them—all dressed in desert khakis and com-
bat boots and carrying a selection of Heckler & Koch
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MP5 submachine guns, grenade launchers, automatic
pistols, and enough weaponry to launch a small war. This
was the American-Egyptian assault team put together by
the two intelligence chiefs. Alex was still in his Cairo Col-
lege uniform. He had assumed it was what Julius would
have been wearing on the return flight.
Jihaz Amn al Daoula, the Egyptian intelligence ser-
vice, had so far managed to control the night’s news. The
radio and television news stations had all reported that an
attempt had been made on the life of the secretary of
state, but it was still unconfirmed whether she had been
hurt or not. Of course, there were thousands of witnesses
who had actually been there, but most of them were un-
sure exactly what they had seen and the CIA had quickly
put out their own version of events, which had the secre-
tary of state in the hospital in Cairo and the assassin still
at large. Razim might wonder why Erik Gunter hadn’t
reported back. But there was every chance that, in the
middle of the desert, he was still in the dark—in every
sense.
As Alex climbed out of the jeep, the man in charge of
the CIA team came over to him. Alex recognized him.
Fair haired, square shouldered, blue eyes . . . it was Le-
winsky, the man who had tried to interrogate him in the
bell room.
“I guess I owe you an apology,” he said, holding out
a hand. “I never told you my name. It’s Blake Lewinsky.
I know now I was way out of line.”
“That’s all right.” Alex shook the hand briefly.
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375
“I hope you don’t think I make a habit out of this, but
we need to get some information out of the pilot.”
“What information?”
“He probably has a password, an identification
signal—before he lands at Siwa. If we don’t give it, we
could get blown out of the sky.”
“Are you going to waterboard him?” Alex asked.
Lewinsky nodded, acknowledging the jibe. “I think
Manzour has other ideas,” he said. “But I just thought I’d
come over and warn you. It’s not going to be pleasant.
You may not want to watch.”
Ali Manzour had gotten out of one of the jeeps and
had picked his way across the rubble to the place where
the helicopter pilot was waiting. He crouched down and
Alex heard a few soft words, spoken in Arabic. There was
silence, followed by a sudden scream. Standing next to
Alex, Joe Byrne grimaced and looked away.
A moment later, Manzour walked over to them, wip-
ing blood off his hands with his handkerchief. At the same
time, two of his men dragged the unfortunate pilot away.
“It’s just as well we asked,” he said. “The password is
Selket. It is certainly appropriate. Selket is an ancient
Egyptian goddess of death. She is also known as the
scorpion goddess.”
“You’re sure he wasn’t lying to you?” Byrne asked.
“He did lie to me.” Manzour folded the handkerchief
and put it away. “But then I asked him a second time and
he told me the truth.” He turned to Alex. “Everything
now depends on you, my friend. But I ask you again, as
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the father of two sons, you are quite certain you are pre-
pared for this?”
Alex nodded.
“Then I wish you success.”
The twelve men climbed into the helicopter, arranging
themselves with the Americans on one side and the Egyp-
tians on the other, like opposing baseball teams. Unit 777
had also provided a pilot to fly them into the desert. Joe
Byrne shook hands with Alex. “Take care, Alex,” he said.
“You look after yourself.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Alex said.
Alex climbed into the helicopter. The blades began to
turn, picked up speed, and finally became a blur. The
helicopter rose into the air. Byrne was left standing next
to Manzour.
“So that is the famous Alex Rider,” Manzour muttered.
“That’s right,” Byrne said.
“It is not my place to say it, but I think that something
very bad has happened to that child. Did you see it in his
eyes?”
Byrne nodded. He had already put a call in to Alan
Blunt in London and the two of them would speak as
soon as Alex returned . . . assuming, of course, that he
did. Alex had told him not to worry. But he was very wor-
ried indeed.
He watched the helicopter until it had disappeared
into the night. Then Ali Manzour clapped a hand on his
shoulder and the two men returned to the waiting cars.
23
A
P I N C H OF
S A L T
THE HELICOPTER SH UDDERED through the night sky,
carrying its load of twelve silent men and one boy. As it
reached the edge of Cairo, the streetlights fell away and
suddenly it was alone with the stars. Alex was sitting at
the very front, closest to the pilot, and looking out through
the cockpit window. He was aware of the desert, vast and
empty, an infinite blackness below. He slumped back and
perhaps he dozed off—there was little difference between
being asleep and being awake—with the rotors beating
out their progress, hammering in his ears.
And then someone was tapping his arm and he knew
that they were there. How much time had passed? It
couldn’t have been more than half an hour.
Lewinsky stood in front of him and Alex could see the
tension in his eyes. This was the moment of truth. The
fort with all its defense systems was close by. If the orig-
inal pilot had lied to them, they were all dead.
The radio crackled into life. A voice rapped out a sin-
gle sentence, speaking in Arabic. The pilot replied with
one word.
“Selket.”
A long pause. They seemed to be hovering in midair,
as if they had come to a standstill. Then more instruc-
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tions. The pilot visibly relaxed. They had been given
clearance to land.
Looking out, Alex could see the fort, illuminated by
hundreds of bulbs. The whole place was a hive of activity
as Razim prepared to make his getaway. There were men
crisscrossing the courtyard, carrying files and boxes out
of the various storerooms and loading up the Land Rov-
ers and open-top trucks that were parked in a long line.
Nobody was going to be allowed any sleep tonight.
Guards were patrolling the parapets and the rope walk-
way. All four towers were manned. The huge gates were
closed and there were more armed men already watching
the helicopter as it swept down out of the sky.
And abruptly night became day as two spotlights
crashed on, slanting up into the sky from opposite corners
of the fort, capturing the helicopter between them. Bril-
liant light blazed into the cabin. Lewinsky winced, cover-
ing his eyes. But the light gave Alex an idea. The helicopter
was expected. It was being watched. He knew that Razim
would be nervous, wondering about the long silence. Well,
he would give him a signal, set his mind at rest.
Alex unbuckled himself and got up. The door of the
helicopter was operated by a heavy lever and he pulled it
down, then slid the door open, allowing the blast of the
engines and the desert heat to come rushing in. One of
the CIA men called out to him, but Alex ignored him. He
knew what he was doing and he was certain that Razim
would be watching. Holding on to a strap that dangled
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from the ceiling, he leaned out of the helicopter, into the
light, and waved at the fort, grinning as if he had just
done something very clever. This was how Julius Grief
would have behaved. He wouldn’t have waited for the
helicopter to land.
Lewinsky understood what he was doing and nodded
his approval. Alex gesticulated at the pilot, directing him
toward the area of sand that had been hardened to create
a safe landing pad. He saw the main gate swing slowly
open and a jeep burst out toward them. So far so good.
The password had worked and perhaps Alex had been
seen. Razim was turning off his defenses, inviting them
in. There was a slight jolt as the helicopter touched down.
The pilot turned the engine off. Lewinsky got up and
came over to him, taking care to keep out of sight.
“We’ll give you ten minutes.” He still had to shout
over the whine of the engine. “Then we’re coming in.”
Alex nodded.
The Sikorsky had landed about two hundred yards
from the gate. Alex jumped down onto the sand and waited
for the jeep to arrive. It was being driven by a bearded
man in long robes and a headdress. Alex recognized him
as the guard who had brought him food on the night he
had been captured. He pulled up and Alex got in.
“Where are the others?” the driver asked. He must
have been referring to Gunter and the pilot. He couldn’t
possibly know that there were twelve armed men waiting
in the Sikorsky.
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“Take me to Razim,” Alex commanded. The driver
hesitated. “Now!”
The driver was used to obeying orders. He shoved the
gearshift forward and they set off, bouncing across the
track. The gates were still open. No one had any idea that
anything was wrong. They entered the compound, pass-
ing the prison block where Alex and Jack had been held,
heading toward Razim’s house. Alex noticed the old bak-
ery that was also the control center. He had hoped that
the door would be open, but it was closed—presumably
locked—and there were no windows. He could see light
showing through the cracks in the wood. There was
someone inside. Even now, they might be turning on the
mines that surrounded the fort, and if anyone inside the
helicopter so much as sneezed, motion and sound detec-
tors would instantly pick them up.
The jeep pulled in. Alex threw open the door and leapt
out.
“Julius!”
Razim had come out of his house, the smoke
capturing the glow of the electric lights as it curled
upward. He was wearing Western dress— jeans, a loose
shirt, and sandals. Perhaps this was part of a new identity,
but the round glasses and close-cropped silver hair were
unmistakable. The two of them met on the terrace with
the stone lion and the terra-cotta pots. This was where
they had had breakfast. Razim examined Alex with a
mixture of curiosity and annoyance.
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“What happened?” he snapped. “I was expecting to
hear from you an hour ago.”
So Julius had been given instructions to radio in be-
fore he left Cairo. Alex couldn’t have known that.
“She’s dead,” Alex said. He didn’t want to talk too
much to begin with. He was afraid of giving himself away.
“The secretary of state is in the hospital. I heard it on
the radio. But they didn’t say she was dead.”
“Then they’re lying.” Alex tapped the middle of his
forehead with a finger. “I hit her here.”
“And Rider?”
Still acting as Julius, Alex smirked. “He begged for
mercy. He was crying at the end. But Gunter let me watch
when he killed him, and that’s what I did.”
“Where is Gunter?”
“In the helicopter.”
“Why didn’t he come with you?”
“I don’t know, Razim. What’s the matter? I thought
you’d be pleased.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Alex saw the main doors
begin to swing shut, the two halves folding toward each
other. They moved slowly and he knew it would take them
a
full minute to close. That gave him a minute to act. He
turned his back on Razim and began to saunter away.
“Where are you going?” Razim was uneasy. He might
not have guessed who he was really talking to. But there
was some inner sense, some instinct that was shouting its
warnings. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
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“I’m going to bed.”
“We’re not going to bed. We’re leaving.”
“Then I’ll get my things.”
“But that’s not the way to your room!”
And that was what gave him away. Perhaps Julius had
been staying in Razim’s house. But Alex was walking in
the opposite direction, heading past the well.
“Julius!” Razim called one last time.
Alex didn’t know what to do. Should he just ignore
him or turn around and continue to bluff it out? Julius
Grief would have been angry. He would have expected
rewards and congratulations—not an interrogation. The
bakery was right ahead of him. The chimney stood out in
all the electric light. There were guards all around, but so
far none of them had shown any interest in him.
“Stop him!” The two words came cutting across the
courtyard. Almost immediately, Razim repeated them in
Arabic. He had guessed what had happened. He knew
that he had been tricked. Right in front of Alex, standing
between him and the control room, two guards twisted
around, untangling their weapons. The gap between the
two main doors was narrowing one inch at a time. In half
a minute they would meet, cutting Alex off.
He had no choice. He broke into a run, veering around
the well and away from the control room. The outer wall
was right in front of him with a flight of stone stairs lead-
ing up. He took them two at a time. At the same time, his
hand came out of his pocket. He was holding the grenade
that had been there from the moment he had left the
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helicopter. He had already worked the ring loose with his
index finger. He heard two shots and almost felt the
bullets as they thudded into the steps just behind him.
Who was shooting? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered
anymore except for finishing this business once and for
all. There were guards running toward him from every
direction. Everyone was shouting. An alarm had gone off,
jangling in the night air. Alex was utterly focused on what
he had to do. Two more steps and he reached the top,
standing on the parapet with the fort on one side of him,
the desert on the other. A third shot whipped past his
shoulder. He was horribly exposed. Everything depended
on what happened next.
The bakery was below him, but he was on the same
level as the chimney, about five yards away. He could see
the square opening and could imagine the brickwork
running all the way down to the oven. He knew he only
had this one chance. There was a second grenade in his
other pocket, but he would never get the chance to throw
it. How much time did he have left? How long had it been
since he had pulled out the pin? He put all the noise out of
his head. The shouting, the clang of the alarm, the
gunshots. He was back at school. Tossing a Coke can into
a bin. Easy. Nothing to it.
He threw the grenade, saw it arc through the air, knew
that it was going to find its target, that it couldn’t miss.
The grenade disappeared into the chimney without
even touching the brickwork.
It took so long for the explosion to happen that Alex
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was afraid that something had gone wrong, that the gre-
nade he had been given was faulty. He was just scrabbling
for the second one when the blast came. The door of the
control room was blown off from inside and a great blast
of fire and smoke rushed out into the courtyard. All the
lights went out and the darkness of the Sahara threw it-
self onto the fort like a magician’s cloak. Alex threw him-
self down as a machine gun opened fire, splattering the
brickwork behind him. But even as he rolled, he saw that
the main gates hadn’t quite met, that they were frozen
with a gap in between. He knew that Lewinsky and the
others would have heard the grenade go off and that they
would already be out of the helicopter, crossing the des-
ert. If he could survive for a minute longer, he would no
longer be on his own.
His eyes had already gotten used to the darkness. The
fort was illuminated by the moon and the stars—but also
by the flames coming from the bakery. Alex twisted
around and saw Razim coming toward him, already half-
way up the staircase. He was holding a gun. His whole
body was bathed in a red glow. He had once promised to
send Alex to hell and now he looked like the devil himself.
There was a crackle of machine-gun fire from the main
gate. Somebody screamed. The Egyptians and the Amer-
ican agents had arrived.
But it wasn’t over yet. Razim was climbing, closing in
on him. Suddenly the night shimmered and white light
washed over the parapet as a backup generator kicked in.
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385
Alex was in full sight. He reached behind him and brought
out the Tokarev that he had taken from Gunter. It had
already served him well and he had demanded it back
from Ali Manzour. Somehow it seemed right. It was the
only gun Alex had ever called his own. He had wanted it
with him at the end.
There were eight rounds in the magazine. Alex fired
three of them at Razim, then ran around the side of the
parapet, trying to find shadows, somewhere he would be
less of a target. He could see one of the towers ahead of
him and suddenly there was a guard blocking his path,
aiming with his rifle. Alex took out the second grenade
and threw it, diving to the floor at the same time. He felt
the blast, covering his head with both arms, and when he
looked up, the way ahead was clear. He glanced back.
The Americans and the Unit 777 men had reached the
fort. Alex saw them pouring through the gate, spreading
out, and taking up positions across the courtyard. Raz-
im’s guards had almost forgotten him. They knew that a
far more dangerous enemy had arrived.
Alex got to his feet. He didn’t know where to go but he
certainly didn’t want to stay where he was. He was
trapped on the narrow ledge with the edge of the wall on
one side and the courtyard on the other. There was shoot-
ing all around him. He glimpsed an object flying through
the air. It soared through the open door of Razim’s house.
There was an explosion and the building was torn apart.
Two guards had been standing in front of it. There was a
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burst of automatic fire and they twisted around, throwing
their weapons away from them before collapsing to the
ground.
He came to the rope bridge and ran onto it almost
without thinking. The other side of the compound looked
darker and quieter, and right now all he wanted to do was
get out of sight and leave all this to the special forces. He
saw three of Razim’s men rush past underneath him.
They seemed to have given up the fight. They were run-
ning away. One of the Americans appeared behind them,
wearing night-vision goggles. He stopped, took aim, and
picked them off one at a time. Alex realized that the fight
was rapidly becoming a massacre. The invaders were bet-
ter trained and better equipped. They’d had the advan-
tage of surprise. And with all the defenses down, the fort
was nothing more than a killing ground. He felt sickened.
He wanted this to be over.
And then a voice, surprisingly close to him, spoke two
words.
“Don’t move.”
Alex turned around. It was Razim. Somehow he had
caught up with Alex. He was standing with one hand on
the side of the bridge, holding on to keep his balance. The
other hand held a gun. Alex brought around his own gun.
His legs were slightly apart. He could feel himself sway-
ing in the air.
“It’s you. I knew it was you. I knew it the moment I
saw you.” For the first time in his life, Razim felt the full
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387
force of his emotions as they rushed in, overwhelming
him. Fury. Bitterness. Despair. He was out of control,
unable to believe what had just occurred, that everything
he had planned—so carefully, so brilliantly—had been
suddenly taken away from him. “What happened? How
did you do it?”
Alex didn’t answer. The fight was raging on in the
courtyard below them. Some of Razim’s men were still
firing, but it seemed to Alex that the CIA and Triple Seven
operatives already had the upper hand. Either way, Razim
no longer cared. All the blood seemed to have drained out
of him. He was staring at Alex with tears in his eyes.
“I beat you!” Razim whimpered. “I crushed you. I
killed your friend. And you still came back. Well, this is
where it ends, Alex. I will finish you now. Not a slow
death. Alas, we have no time. But every death is the same
for the one who dies.”
He raised his gun.
“Alex!”
The shout came from below. Blake Lewinsky had seen
what was about to happen and reacted immediately,
swinging his machine gun around and firing upward. A
volley of bullets cut into the bridge between Alex and
Razim. Alex lost his balance as the ground gave way be-
neath his feet. He flailed out, catching his hand on the
side, and cursed as he dropped the gun. He saw Lewinsky
taking aim a second time. But then someone opened fire
from one of the towers and the American spun around, a
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bloody stitchwork erupting across his chest. Alex knew he
had been killed instantly. But he had done enough.
Razim had fallen back, dazed. His gun had dropped
onto the bridge . . . it was right beside him. Alex sprang
forward, using all the coiled-up power in his legs. He
reached Razim and grabbed hold of him, his hands clos-
ing around his throat. The bridge had almost been cut in
half, but somehow it was managing to support the two of
them, and for a moment they stood there, swaying in
midair. There was more gunfire and Alex saw a guard
topple out of one of the towers. Razim reached out, try-
ing to retrieve his gun. Alex fell onto him, grabbing his
arm, pulling it away.
And then the bridge snapped. Alex felt the gap open
up. He could keep hold of Razim and drop with him or
he could let go and save himself. At the last microsecond,
self-preservation took over. He fell backward, wrapping
himself in the severed ropes, twisting them around his
arm to tie himself in place. Suddenly his feet were dan-
gling in the air. He felt the strain on his shoulders and
wrists. His body weight dragged down the bridge where
it had been severed, but the section that was attached to
the rooftop held firm, preventing him from hitting the
ground.
Razim hadn’t been so fortunate. He had been trying
to reach the gun and had left it too late to get a handhold.
With a last desperate effort he snatched at the ropes, but
they had been whipped away and there was nothing to
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prevent him falling into the courtyard. If he had hit the
ground, he would have broken both his legs, but instead
he plunged into the mound of salt that his men had col-
lected from the desert. He went in feetfirst, burying him-
self up to the waist. His glasses were gone. His gun had
landed nearby. He was stuck fast.
All around him, the fighting had stopped. His men
were surrendering. The American and Egyptian special
forces were taking control.
Razim moved. His eyes widened in fear as he felt him-
self being sucked into the enormous pile of salt. Alex was
dangling above him on his half of the broken bridge. He
was out of reach.
“Help me,” Razim said.
Alex didn’t move. If he shifted his weight, the rest of
the bridge might collapse.
Razim sank into the salt. It was already up to his arm-
pits. And it was as if he knew what was going to happen,
that the game was finally over. Somehow, in the last sec-
onds of his life, he managed to force a smile to his face.
To Alex it looked like a hideous grimace. “Please . . . ,” he
whimpered. “Help me! Throw me a rope!”
The salt climbed higher.
Razim could feel the pressure crushing his stomach
and chest. The salt pile was like some hideous creature,
drawing him in, inch by inch, swallowing him alive. “You
cheated me!” he screeched. “I was better than you. I
should have won!”
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Alex did nothing. There was nothing he could do.
With the last of his strength, Razim lunged for the
gun, stretching his arm across the surface of the salt pile.
His fingertips brushed against it. But he wasn’t close
enough to pick it up. He gave up the struggle. His arm
was dragged beneath the surface. The salt rose over his
shoulders. Now only his head and neck were visible, as if
he had been decapitated in the fight.
“Don’t move, Alex!” One of the CIA men had reached
the bridge and was crawling toward Alex. “We’re coming
to get you.”
Alex watched.
Something horrible was happening to Razim. The salt
had penetrated his skin, working its way through the
pores. It was as if he was being cooked alive inside the
huge pile. White foam began to bubble out of his mouth.
It trailed out his eyes. Alex was reminded of a garden
slug. He had heard it said that slugs died horribly if they
were rolled in salt.
“Alex . . .”
It was Razim’s last word. His eyes were completely
white. He managed to swallow one last breath, as if it
would do him any good, and then he was pulled beneath
the surface, disappearing altogether. For a brief moment
there was a dent in the surface where he had been, then
the salt poured in, filling it.
“We’ve got you!”
Alex felt hands grab hold of him.
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391
The fighting was over. Alex didn’t care. He was com-
pletely exhausted.
As Alex was helped back down the stone staircase, he
saw Arab guards lined up against the wall with their hands
over their heads. There were bodies everywhere. Two
Americans and a Triple Seven man had been killed, along
with Blake Lewinsky. But most of the casualties were
Razim’s people, lying stretched out in the bloodstained
sand.
Someone gave Alex a bottle of water. “Are you okay?”
Alex nodded.
“Stay here. We’ve radioed Cairo. It’s over now. There
are more people on the way.”
But ten minutes later, Alex had disappeared and at
first there was panic among the special forces fighters as
they searched for him, wondering what had happened. It
was only much later that they found him, outside the fort,
on his own, kneeling beside a burned-out car.
24
D E P A R T U R E S
I
T WAS T IME TO GO.
Alan Blunt had reached his last day as head of MI6
Special Operations. He had spent the morning packing
his personal possessions. It hadn’t taken him very long.
In fact, they all fit inside a small shoe box that now sat in
the middle of his otherwise empty desk. Of course, what
he would really be taking from here would be his memo-
ries, and he certainly had enough of those. It had briefly
occurred to him that he might write a memoir—it was
very much the trend with politicians and departing civil
servants. But of course it was out of the question. It was
part of the job description that he should take his secrets
to the grave. And if he tried to sell them, he might arrive
there sooner than he had expected.
He took one last look outside. It was going to be a hot
summer. Liverpool Street was unusually bright with the
sun flaring off the plate glass windows. There was a pigeon
half asleep on the ledge outside. Do birds sleep? Blunt
tapped on the glass and it flew away. He had once dis-
cussed with Smithers the possibility of using homing pi-
geons to listen in on foreign ambassadors. Homing
pigeons with homing devices around one leg. The Covert
Weapons Section had put in a feasibility study, but nothing
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had come of it. Blunt had seen Smithers a few weeks ago,
after his return from Cairo. There had been a formal de-
briefing. The two of them had not said good-bye.
Blunt went back to his desk and rested a hand on the
shoe box. He was tempted to throw it in the garbage.
There was nothing inside that he really wanted. Suddenly
he just wanted to be out of here. In two days he was leav-
ing for Venice, the first stopping point on a six-week tour
of Europe. His wife was coming with him. It would be the
longest time the two of them had spent together since the
day they were married.
The door opened and Mrs. Jones came in. The new
head of Special Operations, just as he had expected. She
seemed surprised to see him, but that couldn’t be the case,
because she had actually asked for a final meeting before
he left. For a moment the two of them looked at each
other uneasily over the desk. It occurred to Blunt that they
should swing around. Her place was behind it now.
He moved back to the window and sat down in an
armchair that looked antique but which was actually
modern. Like so many things in this building, it wasn’t
what it seemed. Mrs. Jones perched on the edge of the
desk. She was wearing black, a smart suit with a silver
chain around her neck. She was sucking one of her pep-
permints. That was bad news. Blunt knew her habits. She
sucked peppermints when she had something unpleasant
to
say, as if to wipe away the taste of the words.
“Congratulations,” Blunt said. He had only been
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officially told about her new appointment that day. “I
wish you every success.”
“Thank you.” Mrs. Jones nodded briefly. “Have you
made plans?”
“Travel. A little golf perhaps. The BBC have asked me
to join the board.”
“I know. I recommended you.” She paused, her hands
resting on the surface of the desk behind her. “Before you
leave, we have to talk about Alex.”
“Yes. I thought that might be on your mind. How
is he?”
“I’m afraid he’s not at all well. What do you expect?”
“It was very unfortunate. The loss of that housekeeper
of his.”
“Jack Starbright was more than a housekeeper. She
was his closest friend. She was the only adult friend he
had. Certainly the only adult he could ever trust.”
“Nobody could have foreseen what would happen.”
“Is that really true?” Mrs. Jones walked behind the
desk and sat down. She had taken Blunt’s chair, and the
message was clear. She was taking his authority too.
“Scorpia set a trap for us and we walked straight into it.
Levi Kroll turning up in the River Thames with an iPhone
conveniently lodged in his top pocket. A handful of clues
leading us to the Cairo International College. They took
us for fools and that’s how we behaved. If it hadn’t been
for Alex, the secretary of state would be dead and we’d be
at war with the Americans. And all this for the Elgin mar-
bles! It almost beggars belief.”
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Blunt spread his hands. “I take full responsibility. You
don’t need to worry. You can start your new job with a
clear conscience.”
“I wish that were the case. But I agreed to use Alex
Rider from the very start . . . and I’m talking now about
the Stormbreaker affair more than a year ago. I may have
had my doubts about bringing a fourteen-year-old boy
into our world, but I ignored them. He was too useful to
us. And in that respect, I’m as guilty as you.”
Blunt was impressed. There was a quality to his for-
mer deputy, a steel in her voice, that he had never noticed
before. “How bad is he?” he asked.
“As I’m sure you know, he killed Julius Grief,” Mrs.
Jones said. “That was something else, by the way. We
should never have accepted his supposed death in Gibral-
tar and I’ve already given instructions for the whole facil-
ity to be shut down. Anyway, Alex had never had a gun
before, but this time he used it. He was forced to shoot
Julius in cold blood. I don’t think he can be blamed. Un-
fortunately, the effect on him has been traumatic.”
She fell silent for a moment. Blunt waited.
“I’ve talked to the psychologists and they say that for
Alex it was almost as if he were killing himself. After all,
the two of them were identical. What it boils down to is
that part of Alex Rider died with Julius Grief. He shot
himself . . . or perhaps a part of himself that should never
have been born.”
“Maybe that was the part that we created,” Blunt
suggested.
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“Maybe it was. But as far as I’m concerned, the file on
Alex Rider is now closed. It was an experiment that we
should never have attempted. There’s no point raking
over it all now, but we were wrong—both of us. It will
never happen again.”
“Is that why you wanted to see me?”
“No. There’s one other thing you have to answer for
before you leave. The attack on Alex Rider at Brookland
School.” Mrs. Jones waited for Blunt to respond. He said
nothing. He showed nothing more than polite interest.
She wasn’t surprised. “A gunman was sent to shoot Alex,”
she went on. “But curiously, Erik Gunter never men-
tioned it. Nor did Razim. One might almost think they
knew nothing about it. And there are two other questions
that have puzzled me. The first one is very simple. Why
did the sniper miss? It’s true that Alex noticed him and
reacted quickly, but even so, the bullet hit his desk, not
his chair. It’s as if the sniper wasn’t aiming at him at all.
“And then there’s the business at the Wandsworth
Park industrial estate. Alex overheard the gunman talking
to the pilot of the helicopter. “It was fine. Mission ac-
complished.” That was what he said. Was he lying? Or
was he actually telling the truth? Had he achieved what
he set out to do?”
“Where are you going with this?” Blunt asked.
“I think you know exactly where I’m going. You re-
cruited the sniper and the helicopter pilot. You arranged
the whole thing. Scorpia wanted to lure Alex Rider to
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Cairo and they set up the trap. But you had to make sure
that he fell into it. If Alex believed he was in danger—
worse than that, that his friends might also be in danger
too—he would have no choice but to leave. I’ve traced the
ownership of the Robinson R22, by the way, so there’s no
point denying it.”
“I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by denying it, Mrs.
Jones,” Blunt replied.
“What happened to the pilot and the sniper?”
“They survived. They broke a few bones. Nothing se-
rious. They’re both recuperating on the Isle of Man.”
“Do you have any idea how serious this is? You ar-
ranged a shooting in a British school! You brought half of
London to a standstill and you’ve wasted thousands of
hours of police time—and all so you could get your way.
And you were wrong all along. Scorpia tricked you.”
Alan Blunt took off his glasses, wiped them with a
handkerchief, then put them on again. His eyes were sud-
denly tired. “Who knows about this?” he asked.
“Only me.”
“And what do you intend to do?”
There was a brief silence.
“Nothing.” Mrs. Jones might have made the decision
before she came into the room. Or she might have made
it just then. It made no difference. “I can’t separate my-
self from the responsibility in all this,” she went on. “I can
understand why you did what you did. And I won’t stand
in the way of your knighthood. So go to Venice. Enjoy
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your vacation. We’ve been together for a very long time.
We won’t see each other again.”
Blunt stood up. He went over to the desk and laid his
hands on the shoe box. But he didn’t pick it up. He looked
straight at Mrs. Jones. “I’ll say two things if I may,” he
said.
“Go ahead.”
“Try not to forget that some good came out of all this.
I understand that Scorpia has disbanded.”
“Scorpia is a laughingstock,” Mrs. Jones agreed.
“They’ll never work again. Several of their personnel—
including Zeljan Kurst—have been arrested, and the in-
ternational police forces are cooperating to track down
the rest of them. They took on Alex three times and three
times they failed. That was the end of them.”
“Well, one might argue that made it all worthwhile.”
“One might. What else?”
“Only this. Let me give you some parting advice, Mrs.
Jones.” Blunt lifted the shoe box. Now the desk was en-
tirely hers. “The Brookland business was a mistake, as it
turned out. But I had no hesitation in arranging it. And if
you are going to succeed in this job, Mrs. Jones—my
job—then there will come a time when you will have to
do the same. Of course, you know that. You know the sort
of decisions we’ve had to make. But I wonder if you know
what it’s like to live with them? A German philoso- pher
once wrote that he who fights monsters must take care
that he doesn’t become one himself. Our work is often
monstrous. I’m afraid there’s no escaping it.”
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399
Mrs. Jones considered this and nodded. There was
nothing more to say.
“Good-bye, Alan.”
“Good-bye, Mrs. Jones.”
Blunt took the shoe box and left the room, closing the
door behind him.
“Virgin Airways Flight 20 to San Francisco has begun
boarding. Will all passengers please proceed directly to
Gate 3.”
Sitting in the Virgin business-class lounge at Heath-
row, Edward Pleasure closed the book he had been read-
ing and put it away.
“Time to go,” he said.
“Okay.”
Alex Rider was sitting next to him, dressed in jeans
and a dark jersey. He had a carry-on bag for the flight,
packed with books and computer games for his Nintendo
DSi. He had checked in two other suitcases, and they
contained just about everything he now owned. The house
in Chelsea had been cleared and was on the market to be
sold. Alex had taken his clothes, a few photographs, his
tennis racquet, and a soccer ball signed by members of
the Chelsea squad that he had once won in a raffle. He
could have taken more. Edward had offered to arrange a
whole crate to be shipped out. But Alex had preferred to
leave it all behind.
He was going to live in San Francisco with Edward
and Elizabeth Pleasure—and of course with Sabina. The
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two of them had spoken on the phone and she was thrilled
he was coming. “It’ll be great,” she had said. “We’ll be
together all the time. And you’ll love it here, Alex. I know
you will. I’ve already got your room ready for you. And
Mum can’t wait to see you.”
Edward and Elizabeth were now legally responsible
for Alex. It was almost as if he had been adopted.
Curiously, it had been Mrs. Jones who had suggested
it. Perhaps it had been her way of making up for every-
thing that had happened, but she had called Edward Plea-
sure even before Alex had arrived back in England. She
had sorted out the legal work and had managed to get
Alex a full-time visa to stay in America. MI6 had a manor
house—part hospital, part rest home—in fifty acres of
parkland down in the New Forest, and Alex had stayed
there while the arrangements were being made. Edward
had finally arrived two days ago. And now they were on
their way.
Edward Pleasure worked as a journalist, and following
the success of his book about Damian Cray, he was also
a wealthy man. He was in big demand in America, writing
for several of the major newspapers and magazines. He
owed a lot of his success to Alex. After all, it had been
Alex who had discovered the truth about Cray in the first
place. And Alex had ties with the family that went far
beyond his friendship with Sabina. He had stayed with
them in Cornwall, in Scotland, and in the south of
France—where Edward had nearly died when a bomb
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401
exploded in his house. He walked with a limp and still
needed painkillers, but he hadn’t let what had happened
to him destroy his life. He had a beautiful home in Pacific
Heights, a quiet, tree-lined area of the city. Sabina was at
the local high school. Her mother cooked and looked
after the garden and walked the dog (they had recently
taken on a chocolate Labrador) and was writing a book.
It had taken them time to get used to life on the other side
of the world, but they were comfortable and happy.
And Alex was going to join them, to be part of their
family. Edward examined him as the two of them left the
lounge and began to walk to the departure gate. He knew
very little about what had happened out in Egypt. It
wasn’t just that Mrs. Jones had been unwilling to tell him.
He just didn’t want to ask. Jack Starbright was dead. He
knew that much and understood what it meant to Alex.
He also knew that Alex’s spying days really were behind
him, that MI6 would never contact them again.
Alex had barely spoken during the time they had been
together. There was something terrible about the silence
that had taken hold of him like some sort of illness. He
showed no interest in food and barely ate. If he was asked
something, he would respond politely. But he never vol-
unteered anything and there were long minutes when he
didn’t seem to be in the room, when his eyes were some-
where else. At their first meeting, it seemed to Edward
that something inside Alex had broken and would never
be repaired. He even wondered if he was doing the right
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thing, taking responsibility for him, bringing him into his
home.
But even in the past forty-eight hours he had noticed
small differences. Alex was more alert. His pace was
quickening as he made his way down the long tunnel that
connected with the plane, as if he was in a hurry to be on
his way. He had overheard Alex talking to Sabina on the
phone and knew that he was looking forward to seeing
her.
Was it too much to hope that Alex was already heal-
ing? Suddenly Edward was determined. It would all work
out. Alex would be part of a family, something that he had
never experienced in his entire life. He would be thou-
sands of miles away from the forces that had done so
much to damage him and he would leave them far be-
hind. It was a fresh start. He would finally be what he had
always wanted to be. An ordinary boy.
Twenty minutes later, they were sitting next to each
other with their seat belts fastened. Alex was next to the
window, looking out. The plane had reached the start of
the runway and was waiting there while the pilots made
the final checks.
“Are you feeling all right, Alex?” Edward asked.
Alex nodded. “Yes. I’m fine.”
The engines roared. The plane rolled forward, picking
up speed, then rose into the sky.
ALSO BY ANTHONY HOROWITZ
THE ALEX RIDER NOVELS:
Stormbreaker
Point Blank
Skeleton Key
Eagle Strike
Scorpia
Ark Angel
Snakehead
Crocodile Tears
THE DIAMOND BROTHERS MYSTERIES:
The Falcon’s Malteser
Public Enemy Number Two
Three of Diamonds
South by Southeast
Horowitz Horror
More Horowitz Horror
Bloody Horowitz
The Devil and His Boy
